True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 287: Creative Ass
Aired: 2023-04-27
Duration: 01:35:50


=== Creative Club Conversations (01:30) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, Brace.
[00:00:00]  Hello, Liz.
[00:00:02]  I'm real excited about today.
[00:00:04]  You are, are you?
[00:00:05]  Yeah, we got our old friend David Banks here.
[00:00:08]  We're talking City Authentic.
[00:00:10]  We're talking hipsters.
[00:00:11]  We're talking Austin, Texas.
[00:00:13]  We're talking the Creative Club.
[00:00:17]  We are talking about the Creative Class.
[00:00:18]  And also someone named Tony Vegas.
[00:00:23]  With that being said, my name is Brace Belden.
[00:00:26]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:27]  We're, of course, joined by producer and head of Yimby California, Mr. Young Chomsky.
[00:00:33]  And the podcast is called?
[00:00:35]  Well, it's called Trunon, and you're listening to it.
[00:00:38]  Hello, you fucking dog.
[00:01:04]  No, all right.
[00:01:05]  Jesus Christ.
[00:01:07]  You know what?
[00:01:07]  Why don't you take us in with a Bart voice?
[00:01:09]  Why, no.
[00:01:10]  How about this?
[00:01:11]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:12]  Hello.
[00:01:12]  Welcome back.
[00:01:13]  Hi.
[00:01:15]  Here, I got one.
[00:01:16]  I got a good intro.
[00:01:18]  While you were at the David Club, we were at the David Banks.
[00:01:23]  Welcome to the show.
[00:01:24]  Thank you.
[00:01:24]  And you know what I got to say?
[00:01:26]  Your stock not declining.
[00:01:28]  No, it is not.
[00:01:29]  Like many other banks' stock.

=== Eastern European Pedigree (09:55) ===

[00:01:31]  It is weird, though, that if you have like a last name that maybe sounds like Eastern European or Jewish, like you're not like they kind of deny you opening accounts there, but that's, I'm sure it has nothing to do with you or the individual tellers.
[00:01:42]  That's something I never understood about my ancestors was that like they, you know, it went through Ellis Island, right?
[00:01:47]  And you know, they do the dream job.
[00:01:49]  Right, totally.
[00:01:50]  And they do that thing where like, you know, you tried to remove the Jewish sounding part.
[00:01:55]  And so they just went with banks?
[00:01:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:58]  I think it was like Banksofsky or something, Bank Bankowitz or something.
[00:02:00]  And so they just went banks.
[00:02:01]  They're like, man, you cut too early.
[00:02:04]  Like, you have to keep.
[00:02:06]  Yeah, it should have just been banned.
[00:02:08]  Yeah, right.
[00:02:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:09]  Or just go with something completely different.
[00:02:13]  Ellis Island, I've long expressed to be the name-changing guy, my fucking dream job.
[00:02:18]  Yeah.
[00:02:19]  Because of the creative nature of it?
[00:02:21]  Because of the creative nature of that.
[00:02:22]  Yeah.
[00:02:23]  I just, I think I could have put into like, because, you know, like, I feel like I marry both the street and the boardroom in me and one, right?
[00:02:29]  Like, I'm a little bit like half up front, it's like a suit jacket.
[00:02:32]  The bottom is really big pants covered in basquiat kind of stuff that I bought for $9,000.
[00:02:38]  And I feel like to bring that kind of energy to Ellis Island in like 1870s, I think I could have changed this country forever and made us a more tolerant place.
[00:02:47]  Wait, no, but for real though, like, is it because you think you could come up with like really good names?
[00:02:53]  Not because you're like, I want to be the cop, but because you're like, you look like a stan.
[00:02:58]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:58]  Well, I'm just telling you this, right now, full stop, there would be no Franz Zachs.
[00:03:03]  Who would I be?
[00:03:05]  Wait, is that because you don't like my last name or because it's just too ethnic?
[00:03:10]  So I probably would have done something like more American, like basketball.
[00:03:14]  Freedom.
[00:03:14]  Or, yeah, yeah, yeah, Freedom.
[00:03:17]  I would have done some baller.
[00:03:19]  I mean, I might have even hooked you up.
[00:03:20]  Like, if I like somebody, Tiger, you know?
[00:03:25]  Rihanna.
[00:03:26]  I could have hit you with that.
[00:03:27]  That would have been, I think, pretty good in 1870.
[00:03:30]  I don't know.
[00:03:31]  Male Model would be a good one.
[00:03:33]  Not for you, obviously.
[00:03:34]  But just put it in the name.
[00:03:36]  Yeah, Brace Male Model.
[00:03:37]  I think coming into the country with somebody like that in your pedigree and on your papers.
[00:03:41]  I think you should have this job now.
[00:03:43]  I do try to tell people, but unfortunately, people don't really aren't super amenable to that suggestion a lot of the time.
[00:03:52]  If I meet somebody, ask them their last name, I ask them if I could legally change it for them.
[00:03:55]  A lot of times they'll say that's racist or like, please don't say it kind of stuff to me, or I don't know you.
[00:04:01]  Or they're just turning around and running in the other direction.
[00:04:03]  Yeah, they're like, why are you, they take their AirPod out and they're like, I'm sorry, why are you talking to me on the subway?
[00:04:08]  Stop grabbing at my purse.
[00:04:10]  So what's up, motherfucker?
[00:04:12]  Not much.
[00:04:13]  No, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say this to the audience the first time I was here, but I feel comfortable enough now to say that I really appreciate that you take all your guests and put them in a baby Bjorn strap to Young Chomsky.
[00:04:28]  I'm sorry.
[00:04:29]  I feel like I'm flying.
[00:04:30]  Is this?
[00:04:31]  Yeah, okay, because this is the real reason we haven't done an adult baby podcast because it would have hit a little too close to home.
[00:04:36]  Yeah.
[00:04:37]  That's koala mode.
[00:04:38]  We go koala mode.
[00:04:39]  I got to be real.
[00:04:39]  It did make you uncomfortable the first time you came in and you just took off your shirt.
[00:04:43]  Well, you were already.
[00:04:44]  Yeah, I was.
[00:04:45]  It's kind of like an alpha thing.
[00:04:46]  And to you to come in here and kind of big dog me like that.
[00:04:49]  Well, I was watching the second season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.
[00:04:53]  He knows how to butter me up.
[00:04:55]  And they kept talking about how the new one, I forgot her name already.
[00:05:00]  And I think it was Lisa, like touched bellies.
[00:05:03]  Okay, yes.
[00:05:04]  Right?
[00:05:04]  Like, and that's how they met at a party.
[00:05:05]  And they just kept saying that.
[00:05:06]  And the Kali Sins would fuck.
[00:05:07]  Yeah, and they just kept saying that over and over and over.
[00:05:09]  We touched bellies.
[00:05:10]  We touched bellies.
[00:05:11]  Yeah, and it seemed like something, it was like code for something.
[00:05:15]  That's like, you smell like hospital.
[00:05:17]  That was the line from Housewives of Salt Lake City that fucked my ass up.
[00:05:21]  You smell like hospital.
[00:05:22]  It's crazy.
[00:05:22]  Yeah, that goes crazy.
[00:05:23]  That's a hard one to say.
[00:05:26]  Welcome to the show.
[00:05:27]  Thank you.
[00:05:27]  Nice to have you back.
[00:05:28]  Yeah, it's nice to be here.
[00:05:29]  Thanks for taking the train down.
[00:05:30]  Of course.
[00:05:32]  I'm a slut for trains.
[00:05:34]  We were supposed to have you on last week, but we had to cancel and reschedule because of our crazy snafu with the airlines, which I'm not going to talk about this episode.
[00:05:42]  No, there will be another episode for that.
[00:05:45]  We'll see.
[00:05:45]  I want to say because you did ask for feedback.
[00:05:47]  I am pro airline episode.
[00:05:50]  Yeah, I think a lot of people are.
[00:05:51]  And I'm sort of like, really?
[00:05:53]  Well, I think like there is, and from what little I like vaguely remember this, that there are, that like the system that all the airlines use to reserve seats is very old and still working, right?
[00:06:04]  Yeah, and I am.
[00:06:06]  And usually when that happens, yeah, usually when that happens, there's some sort of like graft and like something going on.
[00:06:13]  Like there's a reason why they haven't, you know, quote unquote innovated in that, in that sector.
[00:06:18]  I know.
[00:06:19]  It's going to require Brace and I like doing our best odd lots impression, which I don't know if that's like the best thing.
[00:06:25]  Never heard it.
[00:06:26]  Never?
[00:06:26]  Never.
[00:06:27]  Like more normal lots.
[00:06:29]  It's kind of my thing.
[00:06:31]  But speaking of lots, there you go.
[00:06:33]  That gets developed.
[00:06:34]  Lots of in cities.
[00:06:36]  Lots.
[00:06:38]  Didn't really, you guys know what I'm going with there.
[00:06:40]  David, the last time we had you on here, we discussed many things, some of which I'll make you recite to our audience in a moment.
[00:06:46]  But one thing I want to zoom in on really quickly is the food hall.
[00:06:51]  And since that, when did we record that episode?
[00:06:53]  Like last October, September, October.
[00:06:57]  Was that before we went on that tour?
[00:06:59]  That was before tour.
[00:07:00]  Since that tour, boy, howdy, have we seen a lot of motherfucking lobster rolls?
[00:07:06]  Lobster mac and dishes.
[00:07:08]  Lobster.
[00:07:08]  And you know what?
[00:07:09]  Right down the street, actually, I don't want to say too clearly.
[00:07:12]  Actually, it doesn't really matter.
[00:07:14]  There is a food hall not too far from here that I believe does have mac and cheese with that starting.
[00:07:19]  I'm going to say we went to, I can recite it off the top of my head, Chicago, Philly, New York.
[00:07:26]  Top of the head, not as big as you thought, is it?
[00:07:28]  Yeah.
[00:07:28]  Top of my head.
[00:07:29]  I was trying to do it in order, but it doesn't really matter.
[00:07:31]  DC, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Austin.
[00:07:42]  Do you know how many of those fucking cities look the same?
[00:07:44]  Yeah, they all do.
[00:07:45]  It's crazy.
[00:07:46]  I mean, it wasn't just the whole like, you're on the road and so you're not really paying attention thing.
[00:07:50]  Like, I was paying attention.
[00:07:51]  I was paying attention.
[00:07:52]  And I was like, damn, where am I?
[00:07:54]  Yeah.
[00:07:56]  I will say this.
[00:07:56]  Boston looked a little different because there's some older stuff.
[00:08:00]  Yeah, they got an old timeliness.
[00:08:01]  Except for Cambridge, which just looks like one big, like, it did look like you go to the college or whatever.
[00:08:07]  But it did look like there was a lot of sort of Mexican restaurants about as far on the East Coast as you can get.
[00:08:13]  But yeah, basically, we lived your thesis.
[00:08:16]  Yeah.
[00:08:17]  You're welcome.
[00:08:17]  Was thinking of you through a lot of it, actually.
[00:08:20]  Yeah.
[00:08:20]  And we mentioned it.
[00:08:22]  But.
[00:08:23]  Sorry, I haunted you that whole experience.
[00:08:26]  I was like, damn, these cities look authentic.
[00:08:30]  So your book is called The City Authentic.
[00:08:32]  It is out.
[00:08:33]  It is in your fucking hands.
[00:08:35]  Congratulations.
[00:08:36]  We had you on last time.
[00:08:37]  That episode I think was called The City Authentic.
[00:08:40]  What is the City Authentic?
[00:08:41]  Yeah, so that's the word that I give or the phrase I give to this like third movement of cities in America, but it's international also.
[00:08:51]  First one being the city beautiful.
[00:08:52]  If you ever took like a American or like American Cities or urban sociology course or something, you probably heard about this.
[00:09:00]  Or American history course, you usually get something like this.
[00:09:02]  That's when like, you know, like all the really rich people told other rich people, you can invest in this city because I built a library or some sort of plaza, some sort of like an art gallery, an arch, you know, something, something really big.
[00:09:19]  I put my name on it to tell you that, you know, you could also build something here.
[00:09:23]  And that was, that usually triggered other investment, and then people would show up to, and it coincided with the closing of the frontier.
[00:09:31]  Yeah.
[00:09:32]  So he's like an eastern capital didn't have anywhere to go further west.
[00:09:37]  And so it started retrenching itself into what were at the time mostly, you know, like kind of forts, you know, like military forts and maybe little towns.
[00:09:47]  And then they really become big cities.
[00:09:50]  Then around World War II, we switch because Hitler ruined City Beautiful stuff.
[00:09:58]  That's actually what the history.
[00:10:01]  Hitler ruined it?
[00:10:02]  Yeah, the book on this, Cities of Tomorrow by Peter Hall, puts the end point at Hitler's Berlin.
[00:10:09]  And he's like, he ruined it for everyone.
[00:10:11]  Well, he's like, try to build Germania there.
[00:10:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:14]  It was just like, well, because then it became like, it was just like too goofy.
[00:10:18]  He's like, he made things like too big.
[00:10:19]  And it was like too much.
[00:10:21]  Yeah.
[00:10:22]  He blew it out.
[00:10:22]  Yeah, too far.
[00:10:23]  Classically, Hitler went too far.
[00:10:25]  Too far.
[00:10:25]  Yeah, he went.
[00:10:26]  It's one of the worst things he did.
[00:10:28]  And then came the City Efficient, which gets different names.
[00:10:33]  I just picked City Efficient for obvious reasons.
[00:10:36]  And that one's where code becomes really important, both computer code, but then also the zoning code.
[00:10:43]  Zoning code.
[00:10:44]  Yes.
[00:10:45]  Matt Iglesias' favorite topic.
[00:10:47]  Very, very, he loves that stuff.
[00:10:49]  That and probably the lobster ravioli.
[00:10:51]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  Right, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:52]  Whatever zone, whatever code brings him the lobster ravioli.
[00:10:55]  Yeah, and in that sense, you know, it's like you think over-engineered highways and like, you know, the Sim City sort of, you know, I draw this rectangle that's green and that means residential, right?
[00:11:08]  And like, and talking about land in units to the acre, stuff like that.
[00:11:13]  That starts happening in the latter half of the 20th century.
[00:11:17]  And then I put somewhere around the Obama administration, I think is fair to say.
[00:11:23]  I'm raising the big Hussein.

=== Leasing Predictably Unique Spaces (12:41) ===

[00:11:26]  Yes.
[00:11:27]  Yeah.
[00:11:29]  It's around that time that we start getting cities start trying to position themselves to provide a kind of urban experience.
[00:11:40]  Yeah.
[00:11:41]  And it is what I call predictably unique, right?
[00:11:44]  So you take things that are just a little bit quirky, right?
[00:11:47]  And you just alter them just slightly, put the name of the city on it, and serve it up.
[00:11:53]  And you do that just everywhere.
[00:11:56]  And that's generally what I call the city authentic.
[00:11:58]  I don't know if we actually mentioned this last time we talked.
[00:12:00]  We spent a lot of time on various quirky things in cities, but I famously hate quirk.
[00:12:06]  But I remember specifically when I sort of realized, without of course having the name for it, when in Northern California, they started putting out, I mean, I'm sure this happened in Southern California too, but I think it was more of a Northern California thing.
[00:12:19]  Those like postcards with a bear hugging California.
[00:12:22]  Do you remember those?
[00:12:24]  And it said like, I love CA and like kind of like classical like national forest.
[00:12:28]  Yeah.
[00:12:29]  You know, that like person font.
[00:12:31]  Yeah.
[00:12:32]  That, to me, I was like, there's something amiss here because this doesn't like fit actually in with anywhere I've been.
[00:12:38]  I've been all over Northern California and nothing's like this.
[00:12:40]  Who is foisting this upon us?
[00:12:42]  And it became sort of this like, look for every gift shop in Northern California.
[00:12:47]  So you're saying it's kind of like the city authentic is like a mode of cities advertising for themselves, but also kind of like a method of development at the same time.
[00:12:57]  Yeah, so instead of building a big fucking thing, right?
[00:13:01]  Like a philanthropic endeavor.
[00:13:04]  Let's do it like an arch, guys.
[00:13:05]  Right.
[00:13:05]  Like Rockefeller Center.
[00:13:07]  Yeah.
[00:13:07]  Exactly.
[00:13:07]  Like the David Koch Theater.
[00:13:09]  Yeah.
[00:13:10]  Oh, we have to talk about Shen Yun also.
[00:13:14]  He's like, I thank you for bringing that up.
[00:13:15]  He's, you know, they're my neighbors and I can't.
[00:13:18]  That's right.
[00:13:18]  Yeah, and I'm just constantly surprised that no one knows what they are.
[00:13:23]  We'll talk about that later.
[00:13:25]  But yeah, so instead of building a big thing, you package up history and you sell that history instead.
[00:13:32]  Like an identity.
[00:13:33]  Yeah, an identity of a place-based identity, largely because a lot of, especially small cities and towns, which is what I studied, they're one, afraid that anything that they make will be outsourced, right?
[00:13:44]  So they have to come up with something that, by definition, can't leave the city.
[00:13:49]  And so history is a pretty good candidate for that, right?
[00:13:52]  But the other one is that they also want to position themselves, and here I'm speaking specifically about like these medium to small sized cities, think like under 500,000, 100,000 people, right?
[00:14:03]  They want to position themselves as like these trendy thrift store finds in comparison to like name-brand New York City, which lets you also flatter the person that you're speaking to.
[00:14:15]  He's like, oh, anyone can decide to live in Los Angeles, right?
[00:14:20]  Oh, but you, you're a very smart, savvy person.
[00:14:23]  You found, you know.
[00:14:25]  Hudson.
[00:14:26]  Yeah, Hudson or Marfa, Texas.
[00:14:28]  You want to talk about Obama era, 2008, Austin, Texas.
[00:14:32]  Yeah.
[00:14:33]  This was something I remember reading in your book or in your writings that you sent.
[00:14:38]  I guess that was your dissertation.
[00:14:39]  No, no, no, my dissertation sucked.
[00:14:41]  Don't read that.
[00:14:42]  Okay.
[00:14:42]  Well, then I actually read the book.
[00:14:43]  Yeah.
[00:14:44]  Okay.
[00:14:44]  I just read the book.
[00:14:45]  Yeah, you read the book.
[00:14:46]  So I remember this part about your book where you're talking about all these different towns in upstate New York specifically, like advertising themselves as like the kind of like cool other, the other New York to Brooklyn or whatever,
[00:14:59]  and specifically advertising to these like upwardsly, upwardly mobile, maybe creative class types who live in these, you know, these neighborhoods that they either participate in the later stages of gentrification of or whatever as like a way to like mature out of or like a cool, like a quaint other thing to be part of, like the Brooklyn of whatever, of upstate New York.
[00:15:22]  Yeah, so the one weird thing, one weird thing that other economic developers hate, no, it's that the region that I studied, which is upstate New York, Albany area, we do have two things that are different from most other areas.
[00:15:35]  One, we have the highest union density in the country, which is interesting, largely because of state, all the state stuff is union.
[00:15:44]  And the second thing is a lot of colleges, right?
[00:15:47]  And so what they would do is they would send this Center for Economic Growth, we have this economic development agency in the area, would target former college grads or college grads from the area, from the Albany area, and find them in like Boston and like New York City, larger expensive places,
[00:16:15]  and target them for ads on Facebook and Instagram, probably other ones now, and say like, isn't it expensive to live there?
[00:16:23]  Didn't you like living in Albany area?
[00:16:25]  It's gotten even better.
[00:16:27]  We have lobster ravioli now.
[00:16:29]  Why don't you come back?
[00:16:30]  You could actually afford a house here and stop paying rent, or you could at least pay like, you know, $3,000 for two bedrooms, something like that.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:41]  And they put a lot of eggs in that basket.
[00:16:47]  They're really expecting that to pay dividends.
[00:16:49]  And so far, like, you know, I think the pandemic did a lot more to us than anything else.
[00:16:57]  Yeah.
[00:16:57]  I mean, because it's so interesting.
[00:16:59]  It seems like now, as opposed to when we talk, you know, back in last summer or the early fall or whenever it was, none of us can remember.
[00:17:07]  No one look it up.
[00:17:09]  That a lot of companies are now in the face of, you know, I mean, for a lot of reasons, are now like kind of clawing back workers to their offices, to those big offices that they spend a lot of money on, which are all largely in these big cities in New York and San Francisco and Austin and, you know, whatever.
[00:17:28]  Whereas a lot of workers during COVID are of this kind of class, so we'll end up talking about, I think, a little bit later, this creative class, whatever you want to call it, middle class, That they'd all kind of gotten used to, oh, I can go and live in these kind of like, you know, maybe afford to buy a house in Hudson, in Albany, in, well, obviously Hudson's a little different, but these places that I can either commute or work remotely or whatever.
[00:17:56]  And that now that seems to be kind of people clawing back on that a little bit.
[00:18:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:00]  Well, these companies don't buy or own most of their office space.
[00:18:07]  They lease it.
[00:18:09]  And so because they lease it and they're stuck in a contract, you know, I guess there are like some cases where like, I don't know, if you're like a Deloitte or like McKinsey.
[00:18:20]  It's very different.
[00:18:21]  Yeah.
[00:18:21]  Yeah.
[00:18:21]  They have those like fortress places.
[00:18:24]  Yeah.
[00:18:24]  And they're just like so fucking, I mean, or it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, if the if you owe the bank $5, it's your problem.
[00:18:31]  If you owe $50,000, it's their problem.
[00:18:33]  Right.
[00:18:33]  So there's some leasing companies that are like, oh, shit.
[00:18:35]  You know, like if Facebook doesn't pay their leases, we're screwed.
[00:18:40]  Like that, that is actually starting to happen.
[00:18:42]  There's like all these little stories percolating out that show that the business lease market is.
[00:18:48]  Yeah, commercial real estate is really fast.
[00:18:50]  Yeah, famously doing it.
[00:18:51]  Not doing very well right now.
[00:18:52]  Yeah.
[00:18:53]  A little scary.
[00:18:54]  Yeah.
[00:18:54]  Yeah.
[00:18:55]  Actually, housing in general, a little scary right now.
[00:18:57]  Yeah.
[00:18:57]  Housing, this is something, I don't want to jump around too much, but this is also something that's in the, that I put in the book as something to look out for is that, you know, typically, and this is a question I always get from like geographers or something, like, you know, people in my profession is like, well, cities have always done this, right?
[00:19:15]  Promoted themselves and like, you know, like, you know, move here, stuff like that, right?
[00:19:19]  Like when you were talking about the postcard race, you know, like I, I was, I went to the Schenectady Historical Society.
[00:19:27]  Shout out Mary.
[00:19:28]  She's a listener of the show.
[00:19:30]  Nice person.
[00:19:31]  She runs the Schenectady Historical Society.
[00:19:33]  Very cool.
[00:19:34]  And she.
[00:19:35]  Was that Mary?
[00:19:36]  Yeah.
[00:19:36]  And she, they had all these old postcards.
[00:19:41]  And there was one with like a guy with mumps.
[00:19:44]  So his cheeks are really swollen.
[00:19:45]  And it was like, what did it say?
[00:19:50]  It said something like, you know, I'm having a swell time in Schenectady.
[00:19:53]  Right.
[00:19:53]  You know, so that kind of shit.
[00:19:54]  It's not the kind of thing you really want to put in your promotional material.
[00:19:57]  Come to our town and get the mumps.
[00:20:00]  We're all diseased here.
[00:20:01]  It's like a taxi I said, come to my house and get HPV.
[00:20:05]  You know, so like that, so that stuff's always happened.
[00:20:08]  But what's genuinely new are, one, like these sorts of technologies where like, yeah, you can identify specific people and get them to come to your place, like former college students.
[00:20:21]  Or you can also manage vast national swaths of real estate.
[00:20:28]  Like being a landlord, kind of like Uber, like a taxi driver or a taxi company, was always a regional business.
[00:20:35]  Yeah.
[00:20:35]  Because it doesn't scale.
[00:20:36]  Like there's few things that you gain as like economies of scale as you grow out.
[00:20:45]  But now, you know, with Uber, that never worked, and that's why they never made money and whatever, whatever.
[00:20:53]  But with leasing, that starts to work because they can do everything from manipulate the market, like move up their price and Zillow up this much to affect this other house.
[00:21:06]  And they can do a bunch of stuff to really manipulate housing prices and you can kind of be a whale in the market.
[00:21:16]  Yeah, and they have started to, mostly in Sunbelt cities, right?
[00:21:20]  So like city, they own like plurality of the housing stock.
[00:21:24]  Like Atlanta, it's something, I think like a third of detached single-family houses are like owned by Blackstone or something.
[00:21:33]  It's crazy.
[00:21:34]  So like that, that sort of stuff is also happening in my book also, which is also like where cities start all looking the same, right?
[00:21:41]  It's because they're all owned by the same company and they're all trying to do the same thing and play this playbook that has like these sort of like predictably unique little shticks that you do to make people feel like it's just for them and or like, oh, we only do it this way here.
[00:22:00]  But then when you do start moving around, if you go on tour, for example, you start realizing, oh shit, actually, this is kind of warmed over.
[00:22:08]  I mean, it makes sense.
[00:22:09]  When the cities begin to physically resemble one another, I mean, that's something that I've always really noticed since, because I had the sort of unusual experience of going to most American cities, major American cities, by the time I was 16, just from being in bands and stuff and going on these tours.
[00:22:25]  And I had not traveled very widely prior to that.
[00:22:28]  And so in my head, everywhere looks like it does on TV, where things are kind of like distinct and they have their own flavor.
[00:22:34]  And I realized, I was like, wow, well, while certain areas, like older sections of these, like, you know, Chicago or whatever, do look fairly, you know, dissimilar to each other, a lot of, especially almost all newer developments in these places looked precisely the same.
[00:22:50]  And because of that, because pieces look, you know, physically similar, and they have this kind of homogenized culture in general, right?
[00:22:57]  I mean, maybe there'll be some regional flavor in some places.
[00:23:00]  I mean, yeah, it becomes the only alternative to really sell yourself as a unique place is to either act like your amenities are maybe slightly better or different than amenities that are pretty similar in these other cities or to sell this like history to people.
[00:23:17]  Yeah.
[00:23:17]  Yeah.
[00:23:18]  My publisher was really patient with me in a couple of couple ways.
[00:23:22]  He's like, while I'm also talking about Leasing technologies and stuff like that.
[00:23:28]  I'm also, and this takes up basically all chapter three, I'm also concerned about what is it that these marketers are clawing at in your brain, right?
[00:23:40]  And for that, I think you guys actually set this up really well, right?
[00:23:45]  Because your conversation about Spotify and music, the music industry, and then also that interesting conversation you had about mental health as it relates to TikTok and stuff like that.
[00:23:59]  I just want people to think of those things at the same time because the timeframe is exactly the same as also how cities change, right?

=== Timeframes And Transformations (12:31) ===

[00:24:10]  These same forces are acting in these different arenas at the same time in really similar ways.
[00:24:20]  So why do buildings all look the same?
[00:24:23]  It's largely because the biggest price when a developer is building something, and a developer is nothing but a really strange, very specific kind of investor.
[00:24:34]  Yes.
[00:24:34]  Yeah, because it's not like the developer themselves.
[00:24:37]  Yeah, they don't give a shit about buildings or architecture, right?
[00:24:39]  So what they have is a big pile of money, and they look at a blank piece of land and they're like, I could make X dollars if I built ABC thing.
[00:24:51]  And if ABC thing is held up in some zoning board or whatever, then they don't build.
[00:24:58]  Or if the market goes down, they don't build.
[00:25:00]  But they do want to remain flexible for the longest period of time as they build.
[00:25:05]  And so what ends up happening is they spend a ton of money on the land and then they have a very little amount of money left over to actually build the building.
[00:25:11]  And so what they do is they, it's called value engineering.
[00:25:15]  They pick the cheapest thing.
[00:25:16]  And then, I don't know, like China will build a new sports stadium or something and the price of concrete will go up five cents or something like that.
[00:25:23]  And in which case, like they have to, on the fly, change the building again.
[00:25:29]  And so they'll do stuff like take away balconies and replace them with what's called a Juliet balcony, which is the sliding glass door with then just.
[00:25:38]  But you can just see her because you're looking down and you're hiding in the bush.
[00:25:41]  Romeo up there.
[00:25:43]  She's just in the window.
[00:25:44]  Or for committing suicide easier.
[00:25:47]  They are also sometimes called suicide balconies, yeah.
[00:25:49]  Okay, yeah, look at this.
[00:25:52]  And right, and so everything looks the same because on the spreadsheets, they have to.
[00:25:57]  Right, they're all making the same choices based on what the availability of materials in the market is.
[00:26:01]  Right, and then everything is coming off of a shelf somewhere.
[00:26:04]  Right.
[00:26:05]  And they want to be able to make the decisions at the very last moment.
[00:26:09]  Sure, just in time.
[00:26:10]  Yeah, and the difference, honestly, between a luxury-level condo and affordable housing is the countertops.
[00:26:20]  So that's something I've always found super fascinating because I hate, like I'm sure a lot of people, I hate the way new apartment buildings look.
[00:26:29]  But luxury apartments to me, like I've been in both like kind of newer projects and like, not projects, actually, yeah, projects and like, and newer, like fancy, like luxury apartments.
[00:26:41]  And like, obviously the newer ones are like nicer, but it's the same sort of, it's the same kind of like sterility that you encounter in each.
[00:26:49]  And it's like, it's, it's this, it's the, and people always complain.
[00:26:53]  I mean, there's a famous, you know, people that, that, like, way that apartment, like the mixed-use projects where there's like a Whole Foods at the bottom and some condos at the top, right?
[00:27:01]  How they look the same everywhere and how somehow, even though these are luxury apartments, they look chintzy as fuck, right?
[00:27:08]  Like they look like really like thin sort of particle board outsides.
[00:27:12]  They burn really easily.
[00:27:14]  I think our just our builds are shit.
[00:27:16]  They are.
[00:27:16]  Our builds are shit, right?
[00:27:18]  I'm always just like, what's up with the foundation?
[00:27:20]  You always got to check the foundation.
[00:27:21]  Well, Millennium Tower, famously San Francisco, sunk like seven feet.
[00:27:24]  The problem's always in the foundation.
[00:27:26]  It's a metaphor and a reality.
[00:27:28]  Marcus Aurelius said that.
[00:27:31]  But yeah, it's this very, and it's this homogenized thing where really, like no matter what you're looking at, whether it's luxury or whether it's, you know, like lower income or, you know, quote unquote affordable housing, which by the way, in San Francisco, affordable housing, the legal definition of that or whatever, in terms of it's like $190,000 a year is affordable housing for the units that they have to put in buildings.
[00:27:56]  The number is slightly different than that, but they're all made out of basically the cheapest material possible.
[00:28:03]  And like, I have, I have some strong feelings on the way that a lot of newer construction looks in San Francisco.
[00:28:08]  But it's just funny because that is occurring at the same time as these campaigns to sort of sell the history of these places.
[00:28:16]  But what you're getting is this almost like globalized new kind of apartment building that all looks exactly the same.
[00:28:22]  That's all made.
[00:28:24]  You could show me a picture of a Whole Foods with some condos on top of it in fucking Duluth.
[00:28:29]  And it could be in Los Angeles.
[00:28:31]  It could be in Toronto.
[00:28:32]  It could be in fucking Seattle.
[00:28:34]  It could be in any of these places.
[00:28:36]  And so it's beyond like when I was when I was a teenager, I realized that a lot of cities begin to look the same because there's a highway and there's a McDonald's and there's a Hardee's and there's something, you know, the strip malls and all that kind of thing because we don't really have those in San Francisco.
[00:28:49]  Except for that kind of one in Bryant, yeah, where I went to the jungle when I was Laurel Heights has that kind of one with the shadows.
[00:28:55]  The Trader Joe's.
[00:28:57]  But there's like it's now there's just like these giant sort of luxury apartment buildings everywhere.
[00:29:04]  I think the key to kind of understanding how it can be at once both completely homogenizing and kind of marketing or selling itself as a sort of unique, gorky experience is in that word that you use, authenticity.
[00:29:20]  And I kind of want to go back to that point you were just saying about, because I do think that what you're saying about the things we're kind of talking about in that Spotify episode and TikTok episode, like in a lot of episodes that we've done, we are sort of like circling around something that I think your use of authenticity and the kind of you talk about the kind of reification of this word or of this idea gets at,
[00:29:45]  which is almost like a kind of production and a selling of identity, I think, which can be both flattening while seemingly specific.
[00:29:54]  Right?
[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:56]  So at the beginning of the City Beautiful movement, which could be put as like 1870s Paris, right?
[00:30:04]  Yeah.
[00:30:05]  And where, and this is like a very specific global financial problem, right?
[00:30:11]  Is that like Paris is like, or France in general, and I think probably most of Europe is like having some sort of financial crisis.
[00:30:17]  And so you have to create a spatial fix, right?
[00:30:19]  Like you have to build a big fucking thing.
[00:30:21]  Right.
[00:30:21]  And so Bonaparte or Napoleon deals with that by going to war with Prussia and rebuilding France, Paris, right?
[00:30:30]  Hausman.
[00:30:30]  Yeah, Haasman.
[00:30:31]  Yeah.
[00:30:31]  And he employs Haasman famously.
[00:30:33]  Hausman.
[00:30:33]  He's one of the fantastic books on this.
[00:30:35]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:30:36]  Yeah.
[00:30:36]  But the important thing to think about here in terms of authenticity and identity, right?
[00:30:40]  is that they use this new invention of plate glass to make those famous Parisian cafes.
[00:30:50]  And the...
[00:30:51]  With all their chairs facing the street.
[00:30:52]  Right.
[00:30:52]  Right, yeah.
[00:30:56]  And it's in those where you get like really, really extreme poverty looking at this burgeoning middle class.
[00:31:03]  And they're like literally looking at each other.
[00:31:07]  And this is also when in New York City we're building buildings that are lifted just up off the ground a little bit and are actually designed to like people watch like outside onto the street.
[00:31:20]  And there would be these So you can like look up into the brownstone window and see like how the little yeah, but also that the people in the brownstones can look at that.
[00:31:30]  And the idea, and it was, it was in high society in New York, it was like so specific of where you were walking, when you were walking, who you were walking with, all announced something about yourself.
[00:31:44]  Yeah.
[00:31:44]  Right.
[00:31:45]  And all of those little announcements get embedded in the city.
[00:31:52]  And like in the some of the earliest sociologists start to realize that cities create a specific kind of person.
[00:32:01]  And these are still true to varying degrees, right?
[00:32:04]  Like smaller families, more purposive associations, like sports teams, labor unions.
[00:32:11]  Bisexual woman with mental health issues.
[00:32:13]  That ideology is bullshit.
[00:32:15]  So here's the thing, right?
[00:32:16]  That's true, right?
[00:32:18]  There are these identity constructions that become so much more important to people because where else are you going to get it?
[00:32:28]  Yeah, right.
[00:32:29]  Yeah, yeah, except from other people, right?
[00:32:32]  And then you get like that Mike Mark or the Fisher problem of pre-corporation, right?
[00:32:37]  Of that, like companies making new identities for you to pick up that were never authentic in the first place.
[00:32:44]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:45]  So yeah, so all of this kind of coming together, we're jumping around time-wise, but essentially, yeah, the work of authenticity is essentially to make you feel like there is like a hole for you to like peg.
[00:32:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:00]  Interesting.
[00:33:01]  You're a peg to fit it into the right hole.
[00:33:06]  And when you do that, it feels great.
[00:33:08]  Yeah.
[00:33:08]  Right.
[00:33:10]  Yeah.
[00:33:10]  Pause.
[00:33:11]  Pause.
[00:33:13]  And so like that, that I think Sharon Zukin, urban sociologist, describes it well as like the experience of origins, which is ultimately what the city gets at.
[00:33:26]  Because cities actually aren't a very good place to find authenticity because stuff changes all the time.
[00:33:31]  Right.
[00:33:32]  So like you're never going to.
[00:33:32]  But what is authenticity?
[00:33:34]  I mean, what is even is that?
[00:33:35]  Like, I don't know if I believe that there is an authentic anything.
[00:33:39]  Yeah.
[00:33:39]  Yeah.
[00:33:40]  I mean, not to be too whatever.
[00:33:41]  Like, oh, it's all a construct, man.
[00:33:43]  Like, there's no outside.
[00:33:44]  It's all inside.
[00:33:46]  But like, I kind of, but I do think that.
[00:33:47]  Like, there isn't like, I think part of the search for the authentic is sort of baked into consumer capitalism.
[00:33:56]  Yeah.
[00:33:56]  So that is actually where I conclude the book also is that like just dispense with the authenticity talk in general.
[00:34:02]  Like it's just like it's designed to make you crazy.
[00:34:05]  Yeah.
[00:34:05]  Or it's at least designed as like a rat race, right?
[00:34:08]  Because like as soon as modern developed urban capitalism happened, we developed the authenticity problem, which was also a possible title for the book.
[00:34:20]  And in those authenticity problems is just like, yeah, like, who am I?
[00:34:27]  What do I look like?
[00:34:29]  How do I fit into like this larger idea of the city?
[00:34:34]  And it never fucking works.
[00:34:36]  Because, you know, Liz, I think you're right.
[00:34:38]  You know, like it doesn't, it's a rat race.
[00:34:41]  It's a wild goose chase, whatever the hell you want to call it.
[00:34:44]  It's funny because I fully understand and I think pretty much agree with both of what you're saying there.
[00:34:49]  But like, I think for most of my life, I did feel like I had a place where I lived.
[00:34:55]  Right.
[00:34:56]  And like I was having, I don't know about an authentic like San Francisco experience, but like I had this sort of massive ecosystem that I felt sort of part and parcel to, like I really belonged to.
[00:35:10]  And then when things started changing in San Francisco, that rapidly diminished until any part of that, from the people to the places I went to the bridges I hung out under, all those things had changed in both such blinding pace and in such unrecognizable ways that I felt like I was no longer, like the thing that I had belonged to for most of my life didn't exist.
[00:35:40]  It wasn't just that I no longer belonged to it.
[00:35:42]  It just like it wasn't there anymore.
[00:35:45]  And no part of it, there was no single part of that that existed.
[00:35:48]  Again, from like the sort of cultures that I either straddled or was a part of to the people I knew had all completely disappeared and been replaced by something that I guess maybe authentic isn't because that is authentic too.
[00:36:04]  Like San Francisco, what it is now is authentic.
[00:36:07]  Just not authentic in terms of like the sort of like nostalgic sentimental view of San Francisco.
[00:36:13]  It's this very modern kind of city where you're either you're one of the normal people who's having a pretty hard time there or you're you're fucking zoned out on zonked out on fucking fentanyl or you're a tech person who sort of either works from home or a cafe or is shuffled between those places in an air-conditioned bus.
[00:36:36]  Or a blood boy.
[00:36:37]  Or a blood boy, or yeah, or you're a blood boy.

=== Factory of the Mind (15:07) ===

[00:36:39]  Well, RIP.
[00:36:42]  I think that's right.
[00:36:42]  I mean, I think that cities underwent such a massive just overhaul and total change.
[00:36:51]  I mean, basically starting in the 70s, right?
[00:36:53]  There's like the crisis of the American, the urban centers or whatever, and the kind of collapse of the 70s.
[00:37:00]  And then over the kind of 80s and 90s, as capital kind of like went back into this, I mean, you could speak more to this than I can.
[00:37:06]  I don't really know what I'm talking about.
[00:37:08]  But you're doing great.
[00:37:09]  That by the time we get to the kind of mid to late 90s, 2000s, as the economy is like booming and a lot of people are feeling way more comfortable to move back into cities, you get the kind of, I mean, this is one of the things we want to talk about, right?
[00:37:24]  The kind of birth of this thing called the creative class.
[00:37:27]  Yeah.
[00:37:28]  Which we can talk about about what exactly that is or what that, you know, if that still stands or what that hypothesis is.
[00:37:37]  But it's true that regardless of whether or not that hypothesis is correct, that basically development started to chase it and chase this class and try to basically compete to attract it.
[00:37:50]  Yeah, so you laid out the preconditions really well, right?
[00:37:52]  It's the flight of industry, right?
[00:37:56]  And it's replacement with the fire industry, right?
[00:37:59]  Finance, insurance, real estate.
[00:38:01]  My favorite guys.
[00:38:02]  Favorite.
[00:38:02]  and that's not just like a give me a fire Sorry.
[00:38:08]  It's not just like a swap.
[00:38:10]  That's why cities are so flaming.
[00:38:12]  Sorry.
[00:38:13]  That was bad.
[00:38:13]  Right.
[00:38:14]  It's like those have actual consequences.
[00:38:20]  Like, you can't just swap out industries.
[00:38:22]  They want different things.
[00:38:24]  Right.
[00:38:24]  And so like in fact, they're still very rapacious industries.
[00:38:30]  Yes, yeah, right.
[00:38:31]  Yeah, but they, right, but they have, but their material interests, right, are different, right?
[00:38:34]  So if you're building something in a factory, you actually want low real estate values.
[00:38:40]  You want low land values because you have to build a big fucking factory.
[00:38:43]  Yeah.
[00:38:43]  Right.
[00:38:44]  And that's on the land usually.
[00:38:46]  Yeah.
[00:38:46]  And if you want to expand that factory, that's going to cost more.
[00:38:49]  You need worker housing.
[00:38:50]  You need a lot of people to live there and work there.
[00:38:53]  And that's the other thing, right?
[00:38:54]  Is labor.
[00:38:54]  That's why you got great, like the legacy of these industry towns, right?
[00:38:58]  And then the kind of the deep communities that were kind of formed around these factory towns and all of that.
[00:39:04]  Yeah.
[00:39:04]  And you would get these uneasy alliances between the workers and the boss when it came to things like the value of work and the value of land because they did kind of have to balance out.
[00:39:17]  Yeah.
[00:39:18]  At least in some way that was tethered to reality.
[00:39:20]  Right.
[00:39:21]  But once real estate, mostly and insurance and finance, right, like all replace that, they're not tethered to fucking anything.
[00:39:29]  Right.
[00:39:30]  Land prices going up infinitely forever is great for them.
[00:39:33]  Yeah, it's a great thing.
[00:39:34]  Well, it's also, yeah, because we should, yeah, I mean, to be clear, like the way that they extract profit is very different.
[00:39:39]  They're not actually taking profit off of something that's built out of commodity production or whatever.
[00:39:44]  It's literally skimming off the top.
[00:39:47]  Yeah, it's like a second derivative.
[00:39:48]  Yeah, it's all arbitrage, basically.
[00:39:51]  And so that shift means that cities, while crime plummets in the 90s for reasons no one can fully explain.
[00:40:01]  They're still working on that one.
[00:40:02]  Right.
[00:40:04]  So cities are safer than ever before, but they also don't have any kind of playbook for how to develop because they've always done smoke, what's generally called like smokestack chasing.
[00:40:15]  But the smokestacks are all in China now, right?
[00:40:17]  Or in Mexico.
[00:40:18]  So like none of that works.
[00:40:21]  And so that's where Scary Music, Richard Florida, enters.
[00:40:28]  Right.
[00:40:29]  Crazy name, by the way.
[00:40:30]  Right.
[00:40:31]  I tried to figure out if that's his real name, and I think it just is.
[00:40:34]  I will say that like it's a very distinguished name.
[00:40:39]  Richard Florida is like, you remember that name.
[00:40:43]  I will say he's actually part of a like sort of this cadre of what I call city thinkers alongside Mark St. Louis and of course the famous Tony Vegas.
[00:40:56]  Tony Vegas' ideas for building cities were pretty radically different from Richard Florida's.
[00:41:02]  Whereas Richard Florida was really focused on the creative class and sort of like chasing these quote knowledge workers.
[00:41:08]  Tony Vegas, whose work I sort of subscribed to, was super big on a city needs hookers.
[00:41:15]  City needs hookers, it needs croupiers, it needs pit bosses, it needs Italians.
[00:41:21]  He wanted an Italian district there, but not too many because then they start fighting with each other.
[00:41:25]  And most importantly than that, it needed well-heeled, possibly land barons from Texas to come to those cities and sort of be fleeced for all their money.
[00:41:36]  And unfortunately, his career was cut short due to being shot by a rival urbanist.
[00:41:42]  But Richard Florida sort of, I guess, reigns supreme amongst you.
[00:41:45]  You joke, but I truly am a huge fan of Joe Montana, which is in that category.
[00:41:50]  There's so many people with last names that are states.
[00:41:52]  That's weird.
[00:41:53]  Yeah.
[00:41:54]  Yeah.
[00:41:54]  So it's in like this early aughts, like very late 90s.
[00:42:01]  An audience.
[00:42:02]  Oh, yeah.
[00:42:02]  I said it.
[00:42:03]  I said the word.
[00:42:04]  Right.
[00:42:06]  That you get these consulting firms that are also like going around.
[00:42:12]  Everyone's trying to circle this general idea that Richard Florida kind of all puts together in one book called Rise of the Creative Class that comes out in 2002.
[00:42:19]  But there are other people also trying to figure it out also.
[00:42:23]  And so you get these plans that you get these plans that consultants will put out that, for example, Portland, Oregon in 2004 got one called The Young and the Restless, How Portland Competes for Talent.
[00:42:38]  And then the very next year, Tampa got, hired the same firm, and they got The Young and the Restless, How Tampa Competes for Talent.
[00:42:46]  I love it.
[00:42:46]  You got to love a consulting firm.
[00:42:48]  That just like loves daytime.
[00:42:49]  They're just so incredible.
[00:42:50]  I mean, 90 earlier days.
[00:42:52]  It was mostly cheap heroin.
[00:42:54]  That was the sort of sound.
[00:42:56]  Perhaps the true creative class was all at McKinsey this whole time.
[00:43:00]  Wow, yeah.
[00:43:01]  All the preconditions for drugs and rock and roll.
[00:43:04]  Yeah.
[00:43:05]  Yeah.
[00:43:05]  So he writes this book in 2002, and then he rewrites it basically completely 10 years later.
[00:43:13]  Oh, it's a great time.
[00:43:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:17]  I tried to read both kind of like next to each other so that I could see like he's like what someone takes out 10 years later would be like really interesting, but I couldn't because they're completely different books.
[00:43:31]  It's one of those things where it's like he was like a one-hit wonder, and he knew that he just had to re-release the one hit and that would sell because no one else really after that, like I don't hear anyone else citing any of these.
[00:43:46]  Chuck Berry's gonna say Chuck Berry.
[00:43:48]  That's so funny.
[00:43:49]  There was a great little piece on the twist recently.
[00:43:52]  On Chuck Berry?
[00:43:53]  Yeah.
[00:43:54]  I meant to send it to you and then I forgot.
[00:43:56]  Come on, buddy.
[00:43:57]  We got plans to do a Chuck Berry episode.
[00:44:01]  Go on.
[00:44:03]  Before the Rise of the Creative Class, he was writing books about Japanese factories and venture capital.
[00:44:10]  Okay.
[00:44:11]  It was like also very 90s.
[00:44:13]  Yeah.
[00:44:14]  Yeah, people loved Japanese factories back then.
[00:44:16]  Oh, yeah.
[00:44:16]  They're like, they're so efficient.
[00:44:18]  Well, they were doing great up until.
[00:44:22]  So Dragon Rises.
[00:44:24]  Different dragon.
[00:44:25]  I know.
[00:44:25]  Until that dragon rises.
[00:44:27]  The dragons fight each other.
[00:44:28]  Yeah.
[00:44:31]  So the Rise of the Creative Class is, right?
[00:44:35]  It has class in the title, but it's like a bourgeois class analysis, right?
[00:44:39]  So he's using class to mean the collection of occupations that I find interesting.
[00:44:45]  Yeah, it's kind of like pop sociology.
[00:44:48]  Yeah.
[00:44:49]  Very Gladwellian.
[00:44:50]  Yeah, I mean, I think there's like definitely a big genre of this.
[00:44:55]  But yeah, I mean, just because it says class, I wouldn't.
[00:44:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:59]  Yeah.
[00:44:59]  So his shtick is basically like, you know, these creative types, which he says is like a third of the economy, are high earners.
[00:45:11]  And they can do their job almost anywhere.
[00:45:14]  And it's just like, and creativity is like the new oil.
[00:45:18]  I think he probably says that or something like that, right?
[00:45:20]  But the problem is that instead of like the oil being like underground and you drill for it, it's in the heads of these like weirdos.
[00:45:26]  And so how do you make the weirdos like stay in your town?
[00:45:30]  Concentration camps.
[00:45:32]  Yeah, well, voluntarily.
[00:45:35]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  Right.
[00:45:36]  And so what do you do?
[00:45:37]  And so you like offer like rockabilly bars and like artisanal mayonnaise store or like something.
[00:45:43]  So wait, because I've always, I've been long familiar with the concept in general of the creative.
[00:45:48]  I've known who this fucking motherfucker is for a while.
[00:45:51]  Okay.
[00:45:51]  I've never read his book.
[00:45:52]  Yeah.
[00:45:52]  Because this is the thing.
[00:45:54]  If I, and a lot of people are not like this, and I probably should be like the opposite of what I do.
[00:45:58]  But if I'm like, I know I'm not going to like this and I'm going to be like, it's going to make me mad.
[00:46:03]  I'm probably not going to read it.
[00:46:04]  Because there's only so many hours you have in this world.
[00:46:07]  That actually seems like a good thing to do.
[00:46:09]  And I'll be honest with you, my preconceived notions are almost always correct.
[00:46:12]  And you can judge a book by its cover.
[00:46:14]  For 99% of the time, you can.
[00:46:16]  But I will say this.
[00:46:22]  What professions are these?
[00:46:24]  Because from what I've always understood, a lot of his professions didn't exactly seem creative to me.
[00:46:31]  Well, I think it's a different kind of creative.
[00:46:32]  I wouldn't say it's like creative as in like their crew, like creative arts.
[00:46:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:37]  I'm not even saying, yeah, exactly.
[00:46:38]  I'm not saying creative.
[00:46:39]  Like, I know that it's not referring to like these guys can all rock and roll and play guitar.
[00:46:43]  Although I will say, I did read some anecdote from fucking Dick Florida where he's talking about how he's at some like Austin 360 bullshit.
[00:46:51]  By the way, Austin.
[00:46:51]  This guy sounds like a real jerk.
[00:46:53]  He sounds like, I mean, yeah.
[00:46:55]  We should get to that Austin thing.
[00:46:57]  That is very funny.
[00:46:57]  It's very indicative of the whole thing.
[00:47:00]  But no, let me answer your question about what the hell opposes the creative class, right?
[00:47:04]  Is that so?
[00:47:06]  One thing is that you constantly see him throughout the book also wanting to do like every job is creative.
[00:47:11]  So everyone's like, well, you know, like, well, in Japan, like when everyone on the factory line was able to stop the factory line at any time because they could creatively see that something was wrong, right?
[00:47:21]  Wait, what?
[00:47:22]  Yeah.
[00:47:22]  First of all, you can stop.
[00:47:26]  As somebody who worked on a factory on a lot, a literal conveyor belt in front of me, we could also stop at any time.
[00:47:34]  And the only time we actually.
[00:47:35]  They imported that from Japan.
[00:47:36]  Yeah.
[00:47:37]  They did actually, I will say this, they did try to import this Japanese way of organizing things for us.
[00:47:43]  And all it was, I kid you not, all it was was we hanged up the brooms differently.
[00:47:49]  Like we put the brooms and like the push brooms, we like put them on the wall instead of leaning against the wall.
[00:47:55]  Was it nice though on the wall?
[00:47:56]  No, it was just more annoying.
[00:47:58]  It's way easier to just lean it against the wall.
[00:48:01]  It's definitely annoying to get in the little thing.
[00:48:03]  Yeah.
[00:48:04]  So he's always like, you can sense it like this like liberal guilt of like, oh, I don't want to say like some people are creative and others aren't, especially since like it's an elite third of like people that make a lot of money, I'm saying, are the only people that are creative.
[00:48:17]  So he is, you see him like constantly go back and forth on this.
[00:48:21]  He stresses an other interview I've read with him that everybody is creative, but these people are creative for work.
[00:48:26]  Right.
[00:48:26]  Yeah.
[00:48:26]  And that they're particularly that their creativity makes money.
[00:48:29]  Yeah.
[00:48:29]  Right.
[00:48:30]  Which is really what he can't say that, but that's what he threatens.
[00:48:33]  Yeah.
[00:48:33]  Yeah.
[00:48:34]  He says the super creative core of the creative class includes scientists, engineers, university professors.
[00:48:42]  That's wrong.
[00:48:43]  Poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as thought leadership of modern society.
[00:48:52]  No.
[00:48:52]  Non-fiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion makers.
[00:49:01]  That's the creative class.
[00:49:02]  But I do think, okay, so he, I mean, he's like a goofball.
[00:49:05]  And that book sounds like, I mean, it's also just incredibly dated.
[00:49:08]  Yeah.
[00:49:09]  But I think he is onto something, right?
[00:49:11]  And he's correct in that, like, the sort of what we're talking about with this sort of moment in the 70s, right, where you talk about the kind of, you're saying, this sort of like deindustrialization and this kind of evolution, maybe devolution?
[00:49:25]  I don't know, of Western capitalism where you moved away from the factory floor and into kind of the production of something else, right?
[00:49:33]  And that includes like knowledge production, like they're saying, like these quote-unquote thought leaders or knowledge production.
[00:49:41]  I mean, this has been exploded, obviously, thanks to social media, which is a whole different beast.
[00:49:46]  But also, all the kind of like attending bullshit that's necessary for this transition into like a consumption economy, right?
[00:49:55]  So you have the kind of blowing up of the service sector and that becoming like a huge, massive part of the economy.
[00:50:01]  And then also this quote-unquote creative industry, which is everything from advertising to, I mean, what we would usually call unproductive or what some people call like immaterial labor.
[00:50:11]  Yeah.
[00:50:11]  Right?
[00:50:12]  The stuff that all the real housewives do.
[00:50:14]  Right?
[00:50:15]  Like you do look at like all of their jobs and a lot of it's like marketing.
[00:50:18]  What's a UX designer?
[00:50:20]  Yeah.
[00:50:20]  That's a massive part of every tech company and that's a quote unquote creative.
[00:50:26]  That's part of the unproductive labor, right?
[00:50:29]  Or like a think tank researcher.
[00:50:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:50:31]  You know what I mean?
[00:50:32]  Like, it's like, to me, like, that's why I was, when I was reading about this, I was like, I don't know if these jobs are like all very, like, I don't know if a novelist is similar to a like a think tank researcher or a lawyer or a college professor.
[00:50:46]  Well, maybe a college professor.
[00:50:48]  But to me, it's almost like grouping people together basically by consumptive habits.
[00:50:52]  Exactly.
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:53]  Consumptive habits and tax brackets.
[00:50:56]  Tax brackets.
[00:50:56]  Well, maybe not.
[00:50:57]  I don't know.
[00:50:57]  Poet.
[00:50:58]  I don't know.
[00:50:58]  Yeah, I'm like, that's the thing.
[00:50:59]  I'm like, dog, I don't know if this guy has really.
[00:51:01]  Maybe your book sold a lot.
[00:51:04]  I don't know.
[00:51:04]  I think the aspect of production is there, though.
[00:51:06]  I think there's something interesting where it's like, you know, there's this kind of image that emerges, I think, in the 90s of this new manager that becomes the embodiment of this creative class type.
[00:51:22]  It feels very gen X, so I feel like it's very 90s, but I think that it also has a lot of parallels to what the quote unquote creator is now, or the content creator or creator, creative.
[00:51:33]  All of those terms get thrown around.
[00:51:35]  And that is very similar to the old bourgeois ideal of the artist, which is that of someone who can marry both independence and economic viability.

=== Ambitious Networks (06:17) ===

[00:51:46]  And you see this kind of emergence of this figure of this neo-manager who isn't like, who isn't locked down to this, you know, managing the factory floor like classically, or even having to deal with the minutiae of planning how things will get produced or whatever, but is actually kind of task-based and is in this sort of like networked, like this networked mode of production, right?
[00:52:13]  Where their job is managing other people who manage projects, and the project is the base of like, of is like the map of production, as opposed to something like very regimented out in a certain time and place in a geography space of the factory floor, right?
[00:52:30]  This is like a kind of transition that happens in the like early mid 80s into the 90s, and then it's completely and totally exploded thanks to the internet, I think.
[00:52:43]  But I do think that that kind of like neo-manager or like new manager type is this sort of like prototype of the creative who's like not tied down to anything, who goes from like firm to firm, who makes these connections, who networks or whatever, and that like person finds their place in the city, right?
[00:53:03]  Because the city is where you also network.
[00:53:05]  It's where like ambitious people get access to other ambitious people whose job it is is to like self-mythologize themselves into networking more projects and more projects and more projects, right?
[00:53:17]  A rootless cosmopolitan.
[00:53:19]  No, but I mean, I do think that this is very different from the kind of industrial mode of capital production that was like ascendant and like in the early mid-20th century.
[00:53:32]  Yeah, so Florida and others talk about what's basically called agglomeration theory, where people who do the same thing live and work close together because they can do whatever it is that they do better when they're next to each other.
[00:53:47]  It's pretty straightforward right there.
[00:53:49]  And that cities are obviously good for that.
[00:53:55]  And that there are even these new frothy tech sector biotechnology scam sort of things, right?
[00:54:02]  You'll hear the recruiters for that say like, yeah, you could technically do this job anywhere, but we usually base them in a major city because we always need them to be within like almost walking distance of media so that we can convince people that like the thing that they're making is valuable.
[00:54:27]  Interesting.
[00:54:27]  Yeah, and so like there is a you're right, Liz, that there is like this like he is on to something and that there is like a form and a geography to this kind of work.
[00:54:41]  And it does start in like the 80s.
[00:54:43]  So like I said, I mean you bring up the consulting firm and that feels like the first iteration.
[00:54:50]  You know what I mean?
[00:54:51]  Of the like classic Deloitte guy that, which obviously even those firms have exploded so much and taken up such larger shares as the decades have gone on.
[00:55:00]  But then you have the introduction of the tech companies, then you have the startups, then you have all of the attending whatever marketeering on that.
[00:55:07]  And then social media, which is just thrown a total, like, it's just like the atom bomb of this shit.
[00:55:13]  Yeah, because like back in like 86, right, David Byrne is making the movie True Stories, which I love and everyone else that I've showed it to hates.
[00:55:23]  Sorry.
[00:55:24]  Sorry.
[00:55:25]  Everyone makes, most people agree with you.
[00:55:27]  I'll be honest with you.
[00:55:28]  You could say David Byrne and you could preface any statement with David Byrne and make the noise.
[00:55:33]  Sucks.
[00:55:33]  But you wouldn't.
[00:55:34]  If it said sucks after.
[00:55:36]  If it said sucks after, no.
[00:55:37]  But you wouldn't be able to anticipate it if you're already saying voice noise.
[00:55:41]  But it doesn't matter.
[00:55:43]  You know what?
[00:55:43]  That's what trauma does to you.
[00:55:46]  But it's a movie about basically Texas instruments in Austin area, right?
[00:55:51]  And there's all these themes of like, well, people just now shop at the mall and they can do their job anywhere.
[00:56:00]  And so how do small towns keep industry and capital available?
[00:56:07]  How to keep capital, yeah.
[00:56:08]  Even their residents.
[00:56:09]  Yeah.
[00:56:09]  Like even, yeah.
[00:56:10]  Right.
[00:56:11]  Like this is a big.
[00:56:13]  Yeah, their tax base.
[00:56:13]  Yeah.
[00:56:14]  I mean, there's, yeah, there's, there's towns all across the world that try to pay people to move there because they're dying towns.
[00:56:20]  Yeah.
[00:56:20]  And the answer is like, yeah, it's like, do you want to live here?
[00:56:24]  Right?
[00:56:25]  It's like it's basically the answer to that question.
[00:56:27]  So, you know, yeah.
[00:56:30]  So like I think you're right on that, that like there is something about having what Florida calls like a people climate or people habitat or something.
[00:56:42]  That whole stuff is very stupid.
[00:56:43]  It's all very stupid, but I do.
[00:56:45]  Yeah, it's all very goofy.
[00:56:46]  Yeah, but underlying that, because he also has to make a graph and an index about fucking everything.
[00:56:51]  Yeah.
[00:56:52]  Right.
[00:56:52]  Which is like essential to like, I think convincing a specific kind of thought leader, political person to be like, oh, okay, well, there's a graph about it.
[00:57:02]  So, Sean, you motherfucker, I literally can't read graphs because I have like a ninth grade education.
[00:57:09]  You're impervious to graphs.
[00:57:11]  Look at this graph.
[00:57:13]  I don't know which one is the Y or the X, to be totally real with you guys.
[00:57:18]  But he makes those things because he always launders more thoughtful ideas into these little sound-bitey, weird things that always drop out the class analysis, like a real class analysis, right?
[00:57:34]  And what stays around are these like is a much more superficial read of things.
[00:57:42]  So even Liz, what you're describing, I think, is a little bit deeper than what he wants to get to in the book.
[00:57:47]  And even though I have a good sense that he knows this, right?
[00:57:51]  He feels a little embarrassed about it.
[00:57:53]  Yeah, but the way that you announce it in the form that he is and in the job that he has, it has to fit in this like Austin 360 event thing.
[00:58:01]  Okay, but can you talk about Austin 360?

=== Davos Creativity Debate (07:46) ===

[00:58:03]  Yeah, Liz, we literally just did an event.
[00:58:06]  I don't know.
[00:58:07]  I don't know why you're we just headlined Austin's recently.
[00:58:10]  Wait, is this the precursor to South Bite?
[00:58:13]  I don't think so.
[00:58:14]  Spiritual?
[00:58:14]  But it's in 2001 that he's doing I think they still might do it.
[00:58:19]  I don't like when, like, when they're like, oh, check out this project 360.
[00:58:25]  Or like, oh, come and visit this 180.
[00:58:29]  It's like, get the degrees out of here.
[00:58:30]  I don't know if they do 180 a lot of places because that would mean kind of the opposite usually.
[00:58:34]  You know what I mean, though?
[00:58:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:58:36]  We were totally wrong.
[00:58:37]  Got to go in the opposite direction.
[00:58:38]  Why can't we twirl around?
[00:58:51]  Yeah, so this is from the Rise of the Creative class.
[00:58:55]  This is like a self-owned that Richard Florida immortalizes in the second edition of his book, where he went to the Austin 360 Think Fluence Conference, whatever the hell it's called.
[00:59:07]  The big one is the one in Aspen now, right?
[00:59:10]  Davos, yeah.
[00:59:11]  No, Davos.
[00:59:11]  Oh, no, that's in Davos.
[00:59:12]  Yeah, that's in Davos.
[00:59:13]  Yeah, right.
[00:59:14]  Yeah, Aspen Ideas Festival.
[00:59:16]  That's where, yeah, Gia Tolentino goes.
[00:59:19]  I honestly, I had a great time there last year.
[00:59:22]  And I don't care.
[00:59:23]  I'm just there for the fucking after party.
[00:59:26]  Some of the Aspen fish scale.
[00:59:29]  Yeah, you know.
[00:59:31]  Hit up a little that Aspen Calvin Clark.
[00:59:33]  Okay, this is what he said.
[00:59:34]  After some predictable back and forth among the panelists about their investments in the music and cultural scene, I used the moderator's prerogative to interject.
[00:59:43]  Creativity is multi-dimensional, I boomed.
[00:59:47]  True.
[00:59:48]  It's not something you can keep in a box and trot out at work.
[00:59:51]  You can't have high-tech innovation without art and music.
[00:59:55]  All forms of creativity feed off each other, and so on.
[01:00:00]  Then a sudden inspiration struck me.
[01:00:03]  Wow, creative inspiration struck him.
[01:00:05]  Well, he's in Austin.
[01:00:07]  That would be great to strike him.
[01:00:08]  If you really want to know how important this is, I said, don't ask your fellow high-tech CEOs or the mayor or the head of the Chamber of Commerce.
[01:00:18]  Ask the guys in the band.
[01:00:19]  I gestured grandly to the musicians seated at the edge of the stage who looked like the members of Conan O'Brien's late night ensemble.
[01:00:26]  Wow, not the Conan O'Brien's late night ensemble.
[01:00:29]  Then they were supposed to denote something that they're really hardcore and very creative.
[01:00:34]  It was ensued.
[01:00:35]  Quest love was there.
[01:00:39]  Then one of the panelists clued me in.
[01:00:42]  The guys in the band, now grinning broadly at me, were not local grungers.
[01:00:48]  All of them were high-tech CEOs and venture capitalists themselves.
[01:00:53]  It was as if Jack Welch, well, George Soros and Warren Buffett had gotten down and jammed for the crowd at Davos.
[01:01:01]  I would love to see those guys in heaven with a hell of a band.
[01:01:06]  But the eagle soar like she's never soar before.
[01:01:13]  I want to say something about that because I read that quote and I had a lot to think about after reading it.
[01:01:21]  Because, you know, Bay Area, right?
[01:01:24]  What's the Bay Area got?
[01:01:25]  A lot of high-tech firms, probably many of them.
[01:01:27]  They're fucking CEOs, those motherfuckers, you know, companies live there, right?
[01:01:33]  Silicon Valley, San Jose, the South Bay, right?
[01:01:38]  What cultural export has Silicon Valley had besides, I'm not going to, you know, eating those words.
[01:01:48]  What cultural export has Silicon Valley had in the past, like since since it became what it is, right?
[01:01:56]  Well, I think this is a really good point because I do think that like what the fuck does creativity, again, I'm going to put that in quotes in the same way that I put authenticity in quotes, what does that mean when we've just seen the fucking crypto boom and bust?
[01:02:12]  Like what does it mean when, so you have the fire industries, as you point out, flooding these cities, that changes.
[01:02:19]  What does creativity in these industries said mean?
[01:02:22]  It means increasingly obtuse and rapacious derivatives products.
[01:02:28]  Bullshit on the bottom.
[01:02:29]  It means a ton of spiz, like we always talk about.
[01:02:32]  But it means like, you know, more terrible shit that people haven't asked for.
[01:02:37]  It means creativity in NFTs.
[01:02:39]  Like, what is that?
[01:02:40]  What is creativity there?
[01:02:42]  And like, I think that's a really good question.
[01:02:45]  Like, I don't know, I really resent like the very casual way we talk about creativity and innovation in this country.
[01:02:55]  Like, it's completely and totally inseparable from like any kind of like profit, right?
[01:03:00]  It's like the only way to be innovative is in making this thing that makes money, uber innovation, you know what I mean?
[01:03:06]  Which doesn't make money, but you know my point.
[01:03:08]  Creative to make, you know, an ape NFT thing or even just a fucking Instagram post about an NFT thing.
[01:03:15]  You know what I mean?
[01:03:16]  But like, but it really makes me mad because it does two things.
[01:03:22]  One, it further entrenches this idea, this is something we were talking about yesterday, that like creativity is like some little like gem that you need to access within your individual self rather than a social product that is socially produced.
[01:03:37]  And two, that it doesn't, it blurs and obscures the ways in which we are all actually exceedingly creative in our daily lives as we come up with almost invisible ways to navigate the daily drudgery of existence.
[01:03:52]  That's how we are all socially creative.
[01:03:54]  And creativity is like sparked, it is both like a process and product of social production.
[01:04:00]  It is within our sociality and our desire for sociality that we achieve something creative, that we produce something creative.
[01:04:08]  It is not within this kind of like, you know, this bourgeois ideal of some fucking like office manager, like deep inside themselves, like accessing their creative potential to come up with a fucking app.
[01:04:22]  Like, it makes me so mad.
[01:04:24]  The way that like, what is the difference between an advertiser and a car salesman?
[01:04:28]  Nothing.
[01:04:28]  There's none.
[01:04:29]  There's none.
[01:04:30]  They're just scale.
[01:04:31]  No, it's just, they're all, at the end of the day, they're just selling a product.
[01:04:34]  That's all they're doing.
[01:04:35]  And yet we have ideologically created.
[01:04:38]  And by the way, I don't think it's like, it's not a coincidence that the class that creates the kind of like ideological fortress or armor to protect the idea that they are so fucking creative is the one coming up with this bullshit.
[01:04:53]  Yeah, and you even see this in the design of interiors and of buildings, right?
[01:04:58]  Like they're basically designed to put sticky notes on them, like post-it notes all over everything.
[01:05:02]  Really?
[01:05:02]  And there was this.
[01:05:03]  With like the material.
[01:05:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:05:05]  Or like it was a really funny story about the Apple headquarters, right?
[01:05:10]  That big circle that they built.
[01:05:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:05:14]  The one they put.
[01:05:14]  The big donut.
[01:05:15]  Yeah, the big donut.
[01:05:16]  Yeah.
[01:05:16]  I don't know about this.
[01:05:17]  That's the big Apple campus is like a donut.
[01:05:20]  Yeah, and they made so much like glasses never get shot out.
[01:05:26]  It had so much glass.
[01:05:28]  It had so much glass and like other like see-through stuff that people would just like keep hitting, running into stuff.
[01:05:36]  Honestly, respect to Mr. Tim Apple, because that is a really good prank.
[01:05:41]  And so it would just be like, imagine trying to come back from running into a wall and then like into a glass wall and then being like, all right, let's all sit down for the board.

=== Gentrification's Gravedigger (10:47) ===

[01:05:50]  Masses on indeed in moments applying to Facebook.
[01:05:54]  And now the most disruptive thing in the world, like, you know, a cold compress.
[01:05:58]  So they have to put stuff on the wall.
[01:05:59]  Yeah, yeah, they put stuff on the walls and stuff like that.
[01:06:01]  Yeah.
[01:06:01]  And like, there's this like designerly affect that I think was big like 2011, 2012.
[01:06:08]  The height of Joni, what the fuck is his name?
[01:06:10]  Joni Ives.
[01:06:11]  Yeah, Johnny Ives.
[01:06:12]  Yeah.
[01:06:13]  And yeah, and like everyone had to have a riff on like that sort of creative thinking where like you would also like take brand marketeers.
[01:06:21]  Yeah, but you would also take like jobs Like chef and turn it into like food designer or something.
[01:06:26]  That's where mixologists came out.
[01:06:30]  I sort of came out of a drug-induced fugue state and then I emerged into a word world where bartenders, I mean, not any I knew, but I knew that that was real.
[01:06:40]  Where some for some reason, people wore leather aprons all over the place, or they look like the bear.
[01:06:45]  But I think that that is like actually an and maybe we're all talking, this is all kind of circling again around the same thing, where that's the kind of like evolution of what we would call the hipster, where like the hipster was the kind of vanguard of like people who of like you know population like investing objects with a certain aura, right?
[01:07:08]  That then, but that they were like okay with kind of market marketing about, they were able to be very ambivalent about their status of marketing things, right?
[01:07:18]  And they were kind of the vanguard of being able to say, oh, well, it's fine.
[01:07:21]  You can, who cares about selling out?
[01:07:22]  We're all selling out, you know, and also all of these objects we're collecting are, you know, they're invested with this certain kind of aura that and that kind of continues and you see it then sort of like metastasize into other arenas.
[01:07:37]  And I, you know, that births the mixologist, but then also, of course, if I may, the habitus of what this new form, this new class population kind of emerges out of.
[01:07:47]  Well, I think it's no coincidence that Vice, for instance, sort of like the what you think of as like that, that era, like the hipster, right?
[01:07:55]  I mean, there was, I think hipster was used sort of loosely to means people who both wore big scarves.
[01:08:00]  You know what I'm talking about?
[01:08:01]  Like guys who not Lenny Kravitz, but like not too dissimilar.
[01:08:07]  But Vice, Vice as such, like Vice itself didn't actually make money.
[01:08:12]  What it did was made a market for the Vice advertising consulting firm that actually did make money that Shane Smith ran to sell products to.
[01:08:21]  So what it did, Vice created essentially its own market of people to sell the Vice Project.
[01:08:27]  And that became how businesses then operated.
[01:08:32]  Yeah, and that's how cities frequently operate now too, is that they're able to make a brand of themselves and then say like, doesn't this sound like you?
[01:08:45]  Aren't you like independent, but also like love to come together in a group over tacos and tattoos or something?
[01:08:55]  Maybe you know.
[01:08:56]  Yeah, right.
[01:08:56]  It's I just intuit.
[01:08:59]  I'm so creative.
[01:09:00]  I could intuit that.
[01:09:01]  But you know, yeah, it's like there was.
[01:09:04]  I guess that means everyone's a hipster now.
[01:09:06]  Well, I think it's like it's like the post, like post as in like everything is it now kind of like is in like post modern just means like assuming modernism for everything.
[01:09:15]  Well, I mean, it's like post-hipster and then I say that everyone was a hipster up until 2016.
[01:09:21]  And then something happened in 2016 and everything changed, I think.
[01:09:24]  You couldn't be too ironic.
[01:09:25]  No, no, it's not less in affect.
[01:09:27]  And I mean more so in like, I think the use of social media changed, like kind of like flipped a lot of things.
[01:09:33]  And now it's like we've moved beyond the hipster.
[01:09:36]  Yeah, I would say, so the post-hipster thing is in the sense that you're using it, where everything is hipster.
[01:09:44]  That did, I think, occur.
[01:09:45]  Like this sort of like hipster.
[01:09:47]  I was never what you could ever reasonably call a hipster.
[01:09:50]  A, I was younger, I guess, than a lot of the people in that, that were kind of doing that, but I was punk, which was unfortunately rather adjacent.
[01:10:00]  But I saw all of these things that hipster people, because we used to fucking hate hipsters.
[01:10:04]  And we'd like, what we would do is we would like walk down fucking 24th Street and knock hats off of people's heads if we didn't like them.
[01:10:11]  And if they said something, we would, well, really was one guy in particular who, if he listens to this show, I remember, we would knock hats off people's heads.
[01:10:22]  And then if they got mad at us, we would beat them up.
[01:10:25]  And it was like, cause we were like, we fucking hate these hipsters.
[01:10:28]  And then like 10 years later, it's just everything is that.
[01:10:31]  Like that guy became everything.
[01:10:32]  That hipster thing just became, and it was never actually organic to begin with, right?
[01:10:37]  It was this sort of thing that was sold to them by these change of store urban outfitters or American apparel, whatever.
[01:10:42]  But it became like everything is that.
[01:10:44]  And then that became even that morphed and merged with all these other things to be like whatever kind of whatever you would call sort of the urban mono.
[01:10:54]  It's not even urban.
[01:10:55]  It's everywhere.
[01:10:55]  This sort of monoculture that we have today, it is that.
[01:10:59]  And I don't even know, there isn't a name for it.
[01:11:02]  I've always thought that was really interesting.
[01:11:04]  It's like there isn't really like a name for the aesthetic or youth movement that we have.
[01:11:10]  There's all these like micro trends that happen that people come, especially affix with core at the end, which is since I was young, there's all that's, I've never, I've always thought that was whack, but there's like these sort of micro trends that happen, but there's no real like label for the general milieu that like a lot of young people are in.
[01:11:27]  The core corral.
[01:11:28]  Yeah, yeah, the core corral, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:30]  But it's like, it's really just like this is the internet to sized thing.
[01:11:35]  But I will say, like the going back to that Austin 360 thing for a moment, it was funny when the rubber sort of met the road with that stuff, right?
[01:11:45]  San Francisco is a place that has long been known for its cultural exports, right?
[01:11:50]  Like music, poetry, writing, all of this kind of thing, all this, this kind of shit.
[01:11:54]  Bridges.
[01:11:55]  Bridges, exactly.
[01:11:56]  We love that Golden Gate Bridge.
[01:11:58]  But when San Francisco had this massive influx of creative class, right?
[01:12:05]  Of this, the tech industry really started moving into San Francisco proper, all of that was completely annihilated.
[01:12:13]  And like, like Florida's theory on like these cities, like San Francisco is by primarily any metric doing significantly worse than it has in prior time.
[01:12:22]  I think most cities, actually.
[01:12:23]  Yes, yeah, exactly.
[01:12:25]  And like, you know, we were just in Austin, right?
[01:12:27]  And I remember looking from our penthouse suite at the top of the hidden hotel that they let podcasters stay in at the 50th floor where they let you open the windows because they know you won't kill yourself because you're so fucking confident in who you are and your spirit.
[01:12:40]  And looking out, I remember, you guys remember I pointed out to you, like, look at all these fucking cranes.
[01:12:44]  And we were talking to our friends.
[01:12:45]  Yeah, construction there.
[01:12:46]  It's got to be.
[01:12:47]  It's these crazy construction booms.
[01:12:49]  And it's like these cities where the creative class moves in.
[01:12:53]  What they do is they act in this, not even individually, but like as a sort of this bourgeois grouping of class, suck like a blood boy.
[01:13:06]  They suck it dry, right?
[01:13:08]  And then at the end, like by, you know, by the time I left San Francisco, man, like any of the like cultural things that I used to do, my whole life, all of those were gone and replaced by like mini golf, indoor mini golf.
[01:13:22]  Yeah, it's like we used to call this like gentrifying, but that was like a different mode, right?
[01:13:26]  It's like this isn't really gentrifying.
[01:13:28]  It's a little bit different.
[01:13:30]  It's different than that because it's post-gentrification, right?
[01:13:32]  Yeah, totally.
[01:13:33]  Like all those neighborhoods, like the mission had been gentrified.
[01:13:35]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:13:36]  Right.
[01:13:36]  And like, you know, to be to be totally fair, like a lot of people who do that, I mean, here's a hint: if you are a poor person listening to this podcast and you start seeing punks move into your neighborhood, they might be poor too.
[01:13:47]  Get ready to sell your house.
[01:13:48]  But your shit is about to, you are up.
[01:13:50]  I'm sorry, because once the punks come in, some other people are coming in too.
[01:13:54]  And like, there's these sort of stages of gentrification, right?
[01:13:57]  Like they'll send this sort of like, like, it'll be like other poor people, but with like a cultural, like, you know, maybe like a shared milieu, like punks or something will move in there.
[01:14:07]  And then they'll make that neighborhood cool to like people who have some money and because that's maybe something they can like understand, like, oh, there's other white people there.
[01:14:17]  And then they'll move in there with like their, you know, their taco trucks or whatever.
[01:14:22]  Yeah, I mean, like their fancy taco trucks.
[01:14:23]  Yeah, that's what happened with like Soho in New York City, where you have like no, you know, the industry leaves.
[01:14:30]  Artists want big open spaces where they can do all their weird, freaky art.
[01:14:35]  And then that becomes cool.
[01:14:38]  And then it's the 80s, like cocaine-fueled bankers that are like, I desperately want to also be cool and I have all this money, but nothing to spend it on that's like unique.
[01:14:52]  And so they will spend it on the art, but also being adjacent to where the art is made.
[01:14:56]  And that's why Soho, that's why Soho got really, really expensive really fast and how the whole loft sort of aesthetic became really popular, which you also then see in media with like that, by the way.
[01:15:11]  Yeah.
[01:15:11]  Yeah.
[01:15:11]  Yeah, and it's all very much fun.
[01:15:13]  That's the only time you get to say that.
[01:15:14]  Don't, if you say that two more times.
[01:15:16]  Right.
[01:15:16]  Yeah, no, I only said that.
[01:15:17]  What do you mean by Beetlejuice?
[01:15:18]  So, I mean, like, the family, the Dietses.
[01:15:20]  Okay, you're literally talking about the movie Beetle.
[01:15:22]  I didn't know if this was like a college thing.
[01:15:24]  Yeah.
[01:15:24]  Yeah.
[01:15:26]  Damn it.
[01:15:26]  Well, I only said the first syllable.
[01:15:31]  But, you know, like the Dietzes, they move from New York City to Connecticut and find that this town is so adorable, they should sell it to other New Yorkers as like, you know, like bed and breakfast kind of thing.
[01:15:44]  They're like coming up with ways to develop this cute little Connecticut town.
[01:15:48]  And then they find out that their house is haunted and they're like, this is even better.
[01:15:51]  It's a great premise for a movie.
[01:15:53]  Yeah, because you can't find it anywhere else.
[01:15:55]  And so now they're going to make it into like a museum or something.
[01:15:58]  And that's basically what all of these fuckers do.
[01:16:01]  He's like, the end condition of gentrification is always like a Bank of America beneath like apartments.
[01:16:08]  Exactly.
[01:16:09]  It's a Whole Foods with an apartment building that nobody lives in above it.
[01:16:13]  That's the thing is gentrification is really, it's its own gravedigger or whatever.
[01:16:17]  Because it's like they move in.
[01:16:19]  And it's funny because I think a lot of like young people, downwardly mobile young people, don't have, you know, they like move to these neighborhoods not thinking this or maybe being like, you know, like, oh, I shouldn't be moving here because, you know, I'm gentrifying it.
[01:16:34]  But like, it's the only place where I can find a cheap apartment in this city.

=== New Flag, Downward Trend (03:10) ===

[01:16:38]  And like, it's this sort of like vicious cycle.
[01:16:40]  And then these, you know, the Bank of America comes in.
[01:16:45]  Yeah.
[01:16:45]  Yeah.
[01:16:45]  Only place you can't gentrify in America.
[01:16:47]  Damn Tenderloin.
[01:16:49]  I also follow this moment, I think it was in like 2015 or something, where, you know, I talk about like design-y, creative-y people stuff, right?
[01:17:00]  This is cross-podcast violence, 99% invisible.
[01:17:03]  You ever listen to that show?
[01:17:05]  It's a design show.
[01:17:05]  I'm mostly concerned with the 1% that is visible.
[01:17:09]  It's a design show.
[01:17:10]  And they did one on municipal flags, like on city flags, and how city flags are always ugly.
[01:17:16]  Yeah.
[01:17:16]  Most city flags are ugly.
[01:17:19]  San Francisco's flag is actually mentioned as a very ugly, ugly flag.
[01:17:22]  San Francisco's flag, I gotta say.
[01:17:24]  It's pretty it.
[01:17:25]  I'm not familiar with it.
[01:17:28]  There's a reason you're not because it's never flown anywhere because it's so.
[01:17:32]  Because the California one is quite stately.
[01:17:34]  The California one is, well, of course, I would hope it's stately, but the San Francisco flag is not great.
[01:17:42]  It's like a child drawing.
[01:17:43]  There's a flag shit going on there.
[01:17:44]  Yeah.
[01:17:45]  It's like a child drawing of a bird on fire.
[01:17:48]  I'm kind of glad they never.
[01:17:51]  Because I guess, oh, would that be because the city burned down?
[01:17:54]  That makes sense.
[01:17:54]  Yeah.
[01:17:55]  And it says like San Francisco on the bottom.
[01:17:57]  I don't know about, though.
[01:17:58]  Yeah.
[01:17:58]  The 1906.
[01:18:00]  They know the earthquake.
[01:18:00]  They don't know the whole city burned down.
[01:18:02]  Yeah.
[01:18:03]  The fire breaks.
[01:18:03]  Yeah.
[01:18:04]  But The idea was that, like, oh, you should, like, city pride would involve like having a nice flag that everyone puts outside on their porch and like it's all you know, people get tattooed on you.
[01:18:15]  Yeah, you just love your fucking city so much.
[01:18:17]  Right.
[01:18:18]  And this sparks these really interesting fights in all these different cities between people who listen to design podcasts and literally everybody else.
[01:18:28]  And one of the people that are interviewed on that show studies flags.
[01:18:35]  Yeah.
[01:18:35]  They're called Vexilologists.
[01:18:37]  Right.
[01:18:37]  Yeah.
[01:18:38]  And they, and he later does a follow-up to see like how all of these flag design changes went.
[01:18:43]  And they had like a 50% success rate.
[01:18:46]  And the 50% that did not get a new flag was largely because a bunch of people were like, who the fuck are you to change our flag?
[01:18:54]  One, I don't care about flags at all.
[01:18:57]  Fund the police department was usually a sentence.
[01:19:02]  Or it was like, you know, like, who are you?
[01:19:06]  Like, you just got here.
[01:19:08]  We've lived here this whole time.
[01:19:09]  You can't design the flag for this place.
[01:19:12]  You know what?
[01:19:12]  Yeah.
[01:19:13]  Which is our good arguments.
[01:19:15]  And like, that's, and that was like interesting proxy fight for like for the city authentic kind of movement.
[01:19:22]  Because when you look at where they happened, it was all in like the Midwest and the Rust Belt.
[01:19:26]  It was all in all these like downwardly mobile, mid-sized cities that very explicitly said, like, well, we could make a new flag that would be a brand for the city.
[01:19:38]  And we could sell the city with the brand of this new cool-looking flag that would signal to creative class folks that like, you know, we're ready for you.

=== Six Flags Over Midwest (07:07) ===

[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:49]  Right.
[01:19:50]  It's just a circle.
[01:19:51]  Yeah.
[01:19:51]  With a little bit taken out of it.
[01:19:54]  So yeah, I mean, yeah, it happens all over the place in all these really like confounding, very weird ways.
[01:20:02]  And I guess like maybe the one other thing to talk about is like how this is actually structured, right?
[01:20:10]  Because we can talk about like how like all the vibes of like how this stuff changes, but then like who is in charge of that?
[01:20:17]  Like how who opens the money gate, you know, the money lever, like the Donald Duck screwdriver stuff like starts flying.
[01:20:26]  He doesn't have, I mean, Donald doesn't have pockets on that.
[01:20:28]  Right, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:28]  So I'm thinking of his uncle, right?
[01:20:29]  It's his uncle.
[01:20:30]  It's his uncle.
[01:20:31]  Right.
[01:20:31]  That has the.
[01:20:32]  No, he wears a shirt, but then he puts a towel around his waist when he gets out of the shower.
[01:20:35]  Makes no sense.
[01:20:36]  Makes no sense.
[01:20:36]  He's rocking with that dig, though.
[01:20:38]  Yeah.
[01:20:40]  I wanted to mention, this is going to get kind of specific for New York, but New York, but it's because New York does it best.
[01:20:50]  It's like this controlled grift mill.
[01:20:53]  What is New York does it best?
[01:20:55]  They do this above-board corruption.
[01:20:57]  Oh, great.
[01:20:58]  So they take, so all the people that all the rich fucks in your neighborhood that would normally like, you know, be like in a smoky back room, like, you know, you buy way more.
[01:21:11]  Yeah, like, yeah, like you, you build this condo and then I will get shores permits.
[01:21:18]  Yeah, right, yeah.
[01:21:19]  Well, and then also, like, I'll make sure that, you know, my company moves in like all the middle management to here to fill those apartment complexes and so on, right?
[01:21:28]  Like that's sort of that stuff has happened for all time, right?
[01:21:32]  And what New York under Andy Cuomo did was he was like, well, let's just like take minutes for those meetings, right?
[01:21:41]  You know, and just put them out in front, and then I get to pick who does that.
[01:21:46]  And so the state got divided into, I think it's 10 different, what are called regional economic development councils.
[01:21:52]  So New York City is one, Long Island is one.
[01:21:56]  There's like Western New York, Central New York, and the one that I studied was the Capital District, which is like eight different counties.
[01:22:03]  And it's run by like my university's president and a bank executive are like co-chairs.
[01:22:12]  And then like all these business owners also just get appointed by the governor, sit on that for like two-year terms that can be reshuffled indefinitely.
[01:22:22]  Classic development board style.
[01:22:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22:24]  And what they do is they get to release these reports that say in these kind of like coy fashions, like we want the city or we want the region to be like a biotech hub and also the place that you go for great cider or something, right?
[01:22:45]  You know, they'll just like announce this.
[01:22:46]  I love traveling for cider.
[01:22:48]  Yeah, they'll announce a vision, right?
[01:22:49]  So like what this region is supposed to do for somebody.
[01:22:52]  That's such a fun like mad libs.
[01:22:55]  Every time I've announced a vision, such a great little mad libs.
[01:22:58]  The people of Jerusalem have crucified me.
[01:23:04]  And then everyone that wants money that they have, which is usually in the form of like no interest or low interest loans.
[01:23:11]  Well, what?
[01:23:12]  Yeah, right.
[01:23:12]  Yeah, it was.
[01:23:12]  Yeah.
[01:23:13]  Yeah.
[01:23:13]  It's going to be interesting how these things fare now, now that money isn't free.
[01:23:17]  But also like some grants and stuff, usually in like the high five to low six figure range, right?
[01:23:24]  They like repeat that vision back to them with what they want their money, how they want to like receive that money, right?
[01:23:32]  So if like if you own an orchard, you go, I was always planning on turning that into a cidery.
[01:23:37]  Yeah.
[01:23:37]  Give me $500,000 and I will do that.
[01:23:42]  So in that way, they've kind of rationalized all of the palm greasing stuff.
[01:23:50]  But what's funny is the kind of people that show up to this.
[01:23:54]  So In some cases, it's like the office that seems to hold the ability to sit on this board.
[01:24:02]  So, like, my university, like the last four university presidents for my university of like, like, were on that board.
[01:24:09]  But then there's also like just a guy.
[01:24:12]  And it'll just be like a guy that shows up on this board, survives like four different changes in their job and just somehow still stays on to it.
[01:24:21]  And I want to, like, there's one that I think is just too good, and it has a succession tie-in, which is important.
[01:24:28]  All right.
[01:24:28]  There's a guy named Andrew Meader, and everything I'm going to talk about is.
[01:24:32]  He should be in charge of parking.
[01:24:33]  Yeah, right?
[01:24:34]  Yeah.
[01:24:34]  Obviously.
[01:24:34]  Yeah.
[01:24:35]  Masil Stan.
[01:24:36]  He's all this has been reported.
[01:24:38]  So when I'm saying, I'm just repeating what other people have said.
[01:24:41]  So that also makes it non-actional.
[01:24:43]  Yeah, listen.
[01:24:44]  No.
[01:24:46]  So he started on the council in 2014.
[01:24:48]  He was what was called the corporate alliances director for Six Flags in Queensbury.
[01:24:53]  So he would get your company to do their picnic at Six Flags or something like that.
[01:25:00]  And in 2017, though, he is listed as being a member of something called 46 Peaks Studio, which produced a single movie in 2020 called Spy Intervention, which was a romantic comedy that has 33% on Rotten Tomatoes.
[01:25:16]  Well, I mean, that doesn't mean it could be a cool classic.
[01:25:22]  So then he, then by like 2019, he ends up like, he's like trying to get movies to film there.
[01:25:29]  And so now he gets like HBO to film.
[01:25:31]  Atlanta does this shit.
[01:25:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:25:33]  And so the Capital Regions also tried to do this as well.
[01:25:36]  And so like in that, I think it's like the second season of Succession where they go to like the Roy Coe theme park.
[01:25:41]  That's actually the Queensbury Six Flags.
[01:25:42]  Oh, good for him.
[01:25:43]  He had a theme park in Succession?
[01:25:46]  Fuck off.
[01:25:46]  Yeah, that's a huge part of the company.
[01:25:49]  I never.
[01:25:50]  That's what their company is?
[01:25:52]  No.
[01:25:53]  It's like a bunch of different things.
[01:25:54]  Okay, okay.
[01:25:55]  Yeah.
[01:25:56]  There's ATN.
[01:25:57]  There's the.
[01:25:57]  Yeah, and then there's like, they also have like a cruise line.
[01:26:00]  Yeah, there's a lot of people.
[01:26:00]  Cruises.
[01:26:01]  Yeah.
[01:26:02]  Of course.
[01:26:02]  Yeah.
[01:26:04]  And then, but, but then what he basically ends up leaving when the last I can ever find anything of him is he's getting like drawn and quartered in front of Glenn's Falls town board.
[01:26:19]  Like we gave, bro, we gave you like $160,000 for like what you called like social media influencing and nothing happened.
[01:26:28]  And now and now, and then I just can't find him ever again.
[01:26:30]  And so it's like these kinds of characters that show up on these.
[01:26:32]  Very creative man.
[01:26:33]  Creative accounts.
[01:26:34]  Very creative.
[01:26:34]  Very creative.
[01:26:35]  Yeah.
[01:26:36]  And so it's like, so it's like those kinds of people along with like bank executives.
[01:26:39]  And like those are the people that show up on these things.
[01:26:41]  And that is, I think, like, you know, if you Despair that there isn't enough sickos like near proximate to you.
[01:26:50]  Like you just have to rely on national news to find a sicko to like obsess about.

=== Broken Agreements (03:35) ===

[01:26:56]  They actually are around all around you.
[01:26:58]  Oh, I know.
[01:26:59]  You know, you just, you need to like get to the, you know, you need to be like a freak like me and like read these like state report like audit reports or something.
[01:27:05]  Because like all New York also does like these things called industrial development authorities, which is basically just like the state's way of letting private companies get their bonding authority.
[01:27:16]  Okay.
[01:27:16]  So it allows them to do like cheap, cheap loans and stuff like that.
[01:27:20]  And I think it just came out.
[01:27:23]  I think my friend Greg just looked at this.
[01:27:26]  I think it was like $1.9 billion of foregone tax money comes through these IDAs because the IDAs will set up what's called payment in lieu of taxes or pilot agreements where they're like, okay, you build this thing.
[01:27:41]  And of course it takes time to make money on building the thing.
[01:27:44]  So you won't pay taxes for the first five years and then we'll step it up.
[01:27:48]  And then we'll step it up and step it up and step it up.
[01:27:50]  So by year 30, when the building is falling apart because you made it all from Particle Board, then you're paying full taxes.
[01:27:57]  Yeah.
[01:27:57]  And of course at that time, it's all depreciated.
[01:28:00]  And so they're like, oh, actually, it's not worth anything anymore.
[01:28:02]  And they never end up paying taxes at all.
[01:28:04]  And so it's like every year, billions of dollars get funneled away through those sorts of deals.
[01:28:12]  And so that's where a lot of the city authentic stuff comes from.
[01:28:16]  Because at the end of the day, you can do the creative class strategy.
[01:28:20]  You can convince everyone that their best life is lived in whatever city you want.
[01:28:27]  But if you can't build the apartments and the taco trucks or whatever, you need financing for that shit.
[01:28:34]  And that all comes through stuff like this.
[01:28:36]  In different states, there'll be other kinds of names and schemes for these sorts of things.
[01:28:43]  But the industrial development authorities are across North America as a name for something that usually runs those sorts of scams.
[01:28:51]  Well, you mentioned it briefly, but it'll be really interesting to see what happens now that, I mean, one, the interest rate situation is very different.
[01:28:59]  The credit situation is very different.
[01:29:01]  The credit climate, the development climate, the housing climate, the labor climate, everything's changed.
[01:29:09]  Climate change.
[01:29:10]  Real quick.
[01:29:10]  Yeah, it's climate change in so many ways.
[01:29:15]  And it's going to be really interesting to see what happens.
[01:29:17]  And what's going to happen with cities?
[01:29:19]  I mean, a lot of the municipal debt was basically forgiven in the COVID crisis moment.
[01:29:25]  And they're not going to be looking down at that forgiveness again.
[01:29:30]  And so a lot of, you know, there's going to be a lot of, I don't know, I think a lot of shake-ups for a lot of developers and a lot of interested parties in the coming years in cities.
[01:29:40]  They might end up looking a lot different than what they came to look like in the past 30, 40 years.
[01:29:45]  Yeah, cities also took one-time money and built stuff that then costs money to maintain.
[01:29:49]  So that'll be fun also to see how they deal with that.
[01:29:53]  Well, the book is called The City Authentic.
[01:29:55]  It's out now.
[01:29:56]  It is today.
[01:29:57]  Today.
[01:29:58]  Today.
[01:29:58]  As we're recording today.
[01:29:59]  Wow, you told me you were going to the Hudson Yards, Barnes and Noble after this to go buy a copy yourself.
[01:30:05]  I did go to your Wegmans.
[01:30:07]  To what?
[01:30:10]  The Navy Yard Wegmans.
[01:30:11]  Really?
[01:30:12]  Yeah.
[01:30:12]  So I had always known.
[01:30:15]  Oh, yeah, right over there.
[01:30:15]  Yeah, the way that I had always heard it is that, so like Wegmans and another grocery store company owned by people that are on those regional economic development councils called the Golubs run another one called Price Chopper.
[01:30:29]  And I thought they always had like a gentleman chopper.

=== Broke Agreements, Broken Cities (03:58) ===

[01:30:31]  Yeah.
[01:30:32]  I was like, they always had like a gentleman's agreement where Wegmans would never go east of the Hudson.
[01:30:37]  And this Navy Yards one is the first one to east of the Hudson.
[01:30:40]  They broke the agreement agreement.
[01:30:41]  They broke the agreement.
[01:30:42]  Yeah, so I don't know if you're going to find bodies in the parking lot.
[01:30:44]  I love an old grocer war.
[01:30:46]  Yeah.
[01:30:47]  They don't make them like they used to.
[01:30:48]  They don't.
[01:30:49]  There's a, yeah.
[01:30:50]  Well, we're going to put a link in the show notes so people can check the book out and the episode we did previously with you because they should listen to that one too.
[01:30:58]  I also ended up doing a sub stack.
[01:31:00]  Because I had a bunch of stuff.
[01:31:01]  Yeah, we'll put a link to that too.
[01:31:02]  Yeah, I had a bunch of stuff they had to cut from the book.
[01:31:03]  So I figured I just might as well make that into a thing.
[01:31:06]  Put it out there.
[01:31:07]  Give it to the people.
[01:31:07]  Liz is always looking for a new sub stack.
[01:31:09]  Always.
[01:31:10]  All right.
[01:31:10]  Well, it's called Other Day.
[01:31:12]  Perfect.
[01:31:12]  Because it's stuff that I wrote the other day.
[01:31:29]  You know, all them Yimby's talk about legalized apartments.
[01:31:33]  Wait, is that actually something that they're doing?
[01:31:34]  That's what they say.
[01:31:36]  No way.
[01:31:36]  That's so fucking.
[01:31:39]  Yes.
[01:31:39]  Yes.
[01:31:39]  Yeah.
[01:31:39]  I'm not finishing that stuff.
[01:31:40]  You don't understand.
[01:31:43]  You don't understand.
[01:31:43]  Legalize apartments.
[01:31:44]  You don't understand.
[01:31:45]  You don't understand how for years, these people.
[01:31:50]  Because here's the thing.
[01:31:51]  The fucking recombining depression is going to screw these motherfuckers so bad.
[01:31:56]  Listen up.
[01:31:57]  Listen up, asshole.
[01:31:59]  If you are listening to this, the Yimbies in San Francisco, if you are listening to this podcast.
[01:32:07]  They're not.
[01:32:08]  The reason that so many people hate you is not necessarily even because of your beliefs, although I don't like your beliefs either.
[01:32:16]  It's because you are some fucking freak who sucks, who moved here and is like, maybe we should build more Millennium Towers.
[01:32:25]  Everyone just doesn't like you.
[01:32:27]  It doesn't have to make sense politically.
[01:32:29]  No.
[01:32:30]  You know why?
[01:32:30]  You know why people hate these people?
[01:32:32]  Why I hate these people?
[01:32:33]  Why?
[01:32:34]  Here's why.
[01:32:34]  One, you suck.
[01:32:35]  You're stupid.
[01:32:36]  You're stinky.
[01:32:37]  You're annoying.
[01:32:38]  You got bad slogans.
[01:32:40]  You're everywhere.
[01:32:41]  You won't shut up.
[01:32:42]  It's like, go away.
[01:32:43]  No one likes you.
[01:32:44]  Yeah.
[01:32:44]  I hate you.
[01:32:46]  I don't.
[01:32:46]  Here's the thing.
[01:32:47]  They're like, how come you don't want people to fuck you?
[01:32:50]  How come you don't want people to move here?
[01:32:52]  Case in point, you, motherfucker.
[01:32:54]  Oh, you're saying there could be a bunch more of you here?
[01:32:57]  I will tear down apartment buildings if that is the case.
[01:33:01]  Jesus Christ, these fucking people.
[01:33:04]  I just, I will say why I really hate them is because they, and this is a condition that is shared by some of their countrymen who shall remain unnamed for now.
[01:33:16]  The inability to think holistically about anything.
[01:33:19]  Yes.
[01:33:19]  Everything is just spreadsheet Sam, where they say, okay, well, if you see this, it's true.
[01:33:28]  You see, oh, you see this, it goes up, it goes down.
[01:33:31]  Then by this logic, if we just build more, then the market will, because everything is nothing, everything exists in a vacuum.
[01:33:39]  It's just, oh, spreadsheet Sam, it exists here.
[01:33:42]  As opposed to, you know, economies being completely holistic and having moving parts that are related to other places, including land economies and rental economies and property economies.
[01:33:52]  You fucking morons.
[01:33:53]  My thing with San Francisco is it's full.
[01:33:56]  It's full.
[01:33:57]  You cannot, you, I understand that you wanted to move there to be at, you know, Uber or whatever.
[01:34:05]  I'm telling you, I don't like you.
[01:34:07]  I find you weird and your, your ways to be unlike mine.
[01:34:15]  And I don't, and they're like, oh, you don't want immigrants to move.
[01:34:18]  You are not a Mexican, dude.
[01:34:20]  That's not what.
[01:34:21]  I'm trying to act like that's what I'm saying.
[01:34:23]  It's like, they're cool.
[01:34:26]  Bring them into San Francisco.
[01:34:27]  The hell is available.
[01:34:29]  Let me just say.

=== Why San Francisco Is Full (01:19) ===

[01:34:30]  Yeah.
[01:34:31]  Like the boutiques in Hayes Valley that sell the $500 dresses, them having the immigrants are welcome here signed.
[01:34:38]  Okay, buddy.
[01:34:39]  Yeah, well, maybe not there.
[01:34:40]  Welcome to do what?
[01:34:42]  Welcome.
[01:34:43]  Welcome.
[01:34:44]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:34:44]  Welcome, welcome how.
[01:34:46]  What, to work for you?
[01:34:47]  No.
[01:34:47]  They're not hiring.
[01:34:49]  That's the thing is.
[01:34:50]  You won't let them shop at the store.
[01:34:51]  You definitely not let them work for you.
[01:34:53]  No, it's like immigrants are on H-1B visas.
[01:34:56]  We're going to marry like, you know, some middle manager.
[01:34:59]  But now with the downturn, they're not even welcome here.
[01:35:01]  They're not even welcome here.
[01:35:03]  And so my thing is, is this what you fucking Yimby motherfuckers don't understand, is I just literally don't like you.
[01:35:10]  And that's it.
[01:35:12]  All right, let's wrap this show up as if it was a mummy and we were slaughtering all its servants to serve it in the afterlife.
[01:35:20]  My name is Brace Belden.
[01:35:23]  I'm Liz.
[01:35:24]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and this has been Truinon.
[01:35:27]  We'll see you next time.
[01:35:29]  Bye bye.
[01:35:49]  Come in.