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Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it's a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo actually not that high. And people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things. And it seems almost like a cultural love of newness and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in a place where an old thing stood.

Hello and welcome to Metamuse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad. But this podcast isn't about Muse the product. It's about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins. I'm here with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan.

Hey Adam.

and our guest, Devon Zuegel.

Hey.

And Devon, not too long ago, I would've said of GitHub, but I believe as a few months ago, you are now a free agent. How's life treating you?

It's been great. I left GitHub about two months ago and I also moved to Miami around the same time from San Francisco. And so I've been spending my time exploring the city, writing a number of blog posts about it, talking to people in the government and like housing developers and that sort of thing, just because that's what I do in my free time is learn about cities. So it's been really fun to explore my new home.

Yeah, typically when people think of Miami, the first thing they think of is speaking with members from government agencies to better understand how the infrastructure of the city works.

Exactly.

Makes perfect sense to me. And can you tell us what your background is, how you came to GitHub? What came before that, and what might come after?

For sure. My background is computer science, which is probably not a big surprise. I studied that in school. And then I worked as a software engineer at a number of San Francisco startups. And then most recently I was a product manager at GitHub for the last two and a half plus years. I was leading the communities department where we built tools for open source communities. And so it ties in a lot with my interests and love of cities and economics, because they're both about sort of what can you do to create an ecosystem and a platform where people thrive, but without defining it all in advance, how do you create those building blocks? So people can live their lives, find opportunities, build really interesting things that you never would have dreamed of and help give them that platform so that they can put those plans together themselves.

Yeah. It's pretty easy to see the parallels between communities of different types, which includes open source and then cities as well, which is you can't really do a top-down thing. I'm sure we'll get into that a bit here. But unlike, for example, me, my experience in designing products or building software products is often that you sit down, you figure out what you want to make and you make that thing and it may or may not work out the way you want in practice. And then you need to iterate on it, need to get feedback, but it's a very highly controlled experience. Whereas something like community can only be grown. It's incredibly organic. And I think at best you can kind of guide and obviously guidance matters a lot because that's why we get some communities that thrive and others that don't, but it's just nowhere near as prescriptive as what at least I'm used to in product design.

Yeah. And I moved over to product management from software because I really enjoy what I called social technology. I think that that's really a sweet spot for me where it's thinking about the system in terms of how can you shape and encourage behavior that's healthy, but also without mandating it like sort of more of a carrot than a stick, perhaps I'm not sure if even that's like the right metaphor. But I think that cities are a really interesting lens to look at certain types of software because things like social networks, which I would consider GitHub a social network on some level, and certainly Twitters Facebooks, Instagrams of the world, they really are communities of people where you as the designer or the software engineer or whoever's building it don't really control what ends up actually on the screen completely. So you have to think about what are the affordances that you provide?

What does the design language say about what you're supposed to do here? Kind of like how restaurants will have a sense of the space. So if you walk into a really quiet, classy restaurant with like piano playing in the background, everything about the space is telling you, like don't start yelling and like dancing and screaming and whatever. Like this is a place where you're going to have like a nice steak. You're going to sit down, you're going to listen to classical music. But then if you walk into, you know, a Miami club, it's a very different vibe. And it says like you're here to kind of go wild and have fun. So I think that cities do the same of like, how does this city encourage you to live your life? And different cities do that very differently. And I would love for more software teams who are building places for people to congregate online, to think about it in those terms, because I think it's been a little bit lacking in the past and I think it can lead to problems for both the creators and the people who are trying to experience the space.

I think that pretty naturally points to our topic today, which is Order Without Design, which in fact is a book about urban economics and urban planning. And you didn't write the book, but you do have a podcast by the very same name in which you interview the author of the book. Certainly this is not necessarily about the book itself, although I think there's lots to discuss there, but also about this larger question of exactly what you said, how do cities become the way that they are? Each city has its own different character and some of that evolved organically, but some of it was active choices made by people governing and living in those cities. And this is a topic that Mark and I talked about more on the, let's call it the user perspective, in a previous episode, I'll link in the show notes where we talked about our respective decisions to depart San Francisco and why he landed in Seattle.

And I landed in Berlin. And when you're in the position of working on a all remote team or a distributed team, and you can basically choose to live anywhere, or you have the ability to think in terms of not just I'm going to the city because my employer or my school is there, but you're thinking, what are the qualities of the city that I like? What would make it a good place to live? That would be creatively inspiring for me, at least that was the experience that got me interested in urban design as a topic, which is seeing the unique character of Berlin and what it was that spoke to me, spoke to my soul about that and then thinking, okay, well, how did it get to be that way? What were the series of decisions and who are the people? And I know how digital products come to be, but how does the city come to be? So maybe you can illuminate that for us a little bit.

Yeah. So this was one of my favorite books and I read it several years ago when it first came out and instantly just had to become friends with the author. His name is Alain Bertaud, and he and his wife, Marie Agnes, they're in, I believe their eighties now. And they've spent their life living in a bunch of different cities around the world, creating their master plans. They worked for the World Bank, for sanitation systems, transportation systems. They've been in places really far flung, such like all over the world. Really they've lived in Bangkok. They lived in Sana'a Yemen. They've lived in New York city. I'm missing another dozen or so places that they've lived. Some of these cities, I hadn't even heard of it to be honest. And so they've seen cities from a lot of different dimensions. They've experienced lots of different types of people who have different goals for their cities, and they've done their best to shape their work, to fit those goals of the residents of those different places they've been in Port-au-Prince Haiti, where they have a lot of really interesting stories and what you're talking about here about remote work and how, the way we think about cities differently.

Now that more and more people are working remotely. Really an interesting lens to think about this book, because one of Alain Bertauds main points is that historically cities have been labor markets. That's what brings them together. It's what sort of is the sinew that holds it all together. And what he means by city or labor markets is that people come to cities to find opportunities, to make their life better. And certainly they come for a lot of other reasons too, but finding work and finding a way to pay for their life and to better their life is one of the biggest ones.

Yeah. At least the way I understood that argument of his was being a labor market is the root of everything else. If you don't have that, the rest of it won't come. The population density, that leads into culture and art museums and interesting cultural scenes emerging. But all of those are secondary effects. You have to start with the labor market,

Right. And I think he would point to places that are, let's say retirement towns. And that sort of thing as somewhat exceptions to the rule, but those will never become massive cities. Those will never become engines for economic growth for helping people's lives, get a lot better, pulling people out of poverty. They serve a role, but they're not really what he's talking about, but I think it's really interesting because we're now going into a new era where more and more work can be done remotely. The labor market is in the cloud. So if cities no longer have to be the labor market, what does that look like? How do we now think about the places that we live? How does that change the decisions that we make? And sort of that change hasn't completely happened to the vast majority of people still work in person, but there's been a real inflection point. I'd say in the last 10 years, and certainly with COVID, that has made people really start to think about this new paradigm.

Yeah. And there's sort of two dimensions of effects here. There's the people are free to potentially move to different cities. So one can move from San Francisco to Seattle or Berlin or Miami, or you can move to not a city and participate in a sort of distributed labor market. And so there's competition along both those axes potentially

Totally for a really long time, choosing to live in a rural place, dramatically reduced your opportunities. And some might argue that that's still true. I personally think that face-to-face has a lot of really important things that you just can't get via zoom, but at the same time, there's a whole new frontier opening up here. And people from all different countries can now participate in labor markets that used to be centered in the United States, primarily in the case of tech, for example, my boyfriend is from Argentina and he moved to the United States several years ago, but many of his friends and family were not able to get visas or weren't interested in moving. They wanted to stay with their families. And so they're now able to participate in things that are happening in the United States and, and vice versa in a way that they just couldn't 10 years ago. So, in a really weird way, there's people who are sitting in Buenos Aires, but behind a microphone who I feel are a closer part of my community than some people who are my neighbors. And that's just a very different world and will really change the way that cities develop, I think.

Yeah, for sure. And perhaps the most exciting piece for me is you mentioned this idea of social technologies. I think we're going to see some of the benefits and consequences of cities move out to the cloud. If you will. Things like aggregation effects, quote unquote, population density, self sorting, these are all things that you really needed to have a city and a physical space until very recently to get. But now people can, you know, whatever, join the right Discord, something, that'll be very interesting to see that all play out.

Yeah. I'm tentatively excited about it. I have some concerns. For example, I was talking to a friend who's a venture capitalist a few days ago. And he was telling me about how in 2020, during COVID roughly the same number of dollars went to venture capital investments in that year as the previous year. But it went to half as many companies. And his interpretation of was that the business that VCs are in is to find people that they trust and that they think will take that money and do something amazing with it. And his theory here was that because they couldn't meet people face to face, they couldn't build that trust with new people in the network. And so all of the money was going to people who are already in-network and already trusted. And he was a little sad about this because he was thinking like, there's all these people who would probably be amazing entrepreneurs, but because they didn't have that access that they would have had an in-person world, they didn't have that. So I'm not sure if that's completely the right interpretation, to be honest. I think there's a lot of ways to look at that data, but it did give me pause and think like, oh, that's like not great if that is the right interpretation.

Yeah. And I think it's still very early, you know, the world doesn't owe it to us. There's no particular reason this couldn't become very messy and weird for the next 10 or 50 years as it all shakes out. And we talk often on this podcast about how it takes some time to metabolize these big society level changes. I'd say that our technology and our social technology is still very early. Like the communication bandwidth over zoom is nice as it is versus what we had five years ago. It's very poor compared to being in person. And likewise, our social technologies are mostly transliterations of stuff from our previous physical world. So I think we solve a lot in front of us to see how it all shakes out

But I'm optimistic. I'm definitely optimistic, but it's not a done deal for sure.

Yeah.

So how would you answer the question that I sort of posed earlier? The question I pose myself, I suppose, on discovering a city that I liked really well and wanted to settle in, just cause I liked it rather than because an employer was there, which is how do cities become the way that they are. And in particular, who are the people that make that happen?

There's a lot of components that go into that. I think of cities as an ecosystem. And so a lot of different pieces have to be in place for them to be the way they are. But like geography makes actually a really big difference in the way that people interact. And that's not human made usually, but it has a huge difference. Like for example, I live in Miami Beach, which is separated from mainland Miami. It's on an island. And so I'm much more likely to spend time with people who are like on the island with me than I am to like drive into mainland just because there's a body of water between us. And so that really shapes the way life and culture work in Miami and similar geographical features make a big difference in other cities.

Yeah. One I noted in my own city exploration is San Francisco and Amsterdam two places I had spent time are both on these kind of fairly smallish peninsulas. And so they're necessarily constrained on three, I guess an island is four sides, but here you're constrained on three sides. And so there's sort of a limit to how much they can grow or things get denser or they get more expensive. And by comparison to other places, Berlin is one example, but probably most places don't have as much constraint. And as the city grows, they can spread outward. And in that way kind of create more relief or just more space for more people to be there.

Totally. And other factors can have a similar effect. So London and Paris are interesting to contrast to each other where both of them are inland. They're not on an peninsulas or islands. Well, I guess Britain is a very large island, but Paris is much denser than London. And a big part of that is because Paris was basically conquered and like overrun again and again. So they built these like city walls to protect it and they wanted to keep as much of the buildings inside of those walls as possible. And the denser it is, the easier it is to defend. Whereas London being in Great Britain, which is separated by the channel, they just didn't have those problems. They were much harder--much easier to defend, much harder to attack. And so London is much more sprawling than is Paris. And that's sort of a, I don't know if it was a conscious decision by any person, but just the factors that they had to deal with resulted in a very different city form. So I guess those are two answers, geography, and like sort of exogenous factors that just kind of force you into this shape for survival. I think another piece is decisions that are made early on in the city's history. There's an immense path dependence in cities because it's painful to tear things down, unlike in software where it's like, not that costly and this kind of infinite space, you can always write more software for the most part.

Developers get excited when they see a huge number of red dashes in their pull request. Right?

Yeah. They love it because it simplifies things. Whereas in cities, you know, someone like--

Creative destruction

Yeah. They put up a bunch of bricks and like they paid money for them to go up. And it's a more zero sum game in cities than it is in software. Because anytime you build something that means someone else can't build something there until they tear your thing down. And so it leads to very different dynamics and you get much more constrained, like a concrete example of that is here in Miami Beach. There's a lot of beautiful art deco buildings. Miami beach is really famous for this. And so there are rules protecting the art deco because it's a national treasure and you know, I really love them. But what that means is that you can't build something else there and this is a beautiful place to live. It would be awesome if more people could live here, but because the art deco is there, we can't do that. And it forces you to make different types of trade-offs. Do you value this architectural heritage or do you value having many more people be able to live in a place and every community is going to make different choices there.

Yeah. And I think an important thread through everything you just described is that ultimately it's individuals making personal choices in this sort of organic, chaotic mass that ultimately bubbles up to the emergent order, if you will, that you see in cities. And I think it's so easy, especially as software people have to think about, you know, that the city does this, or we should do that. And really it's just a bunch of individual human beings ultimately have to make the decisions and take the actions.

And this, the, I don't know, subtitle or the part that goes after the colon in the Order Without Design book title is How Markets Shape Cities. And of course, markets are very much decentralized, you know, individual actors pursuing their own means, but then that forms into a larger something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Also, if I'm not mistaken. One of the interesting things about the authors experience is he had actually worked for centrally planned economies including, I believe some Soviet work in the 1980s before the USSR ended and then also for the Chinese government. And so he had the chance to even compare a situation where there is no kind of classic market forces like rent figure out, you know, efficient land use. Instead there is urban planners that do just sit there and say, we should put houses over here and restaurants over here.

Yeah. And he also worked in China during the period where they were liberalizing economically and moving from a completely communist plan, centrally planned government to trying to make things a little bit more free market from the economic side. And one of the things that he pointed out was that like, there are a lot of very strict rules that the Chinese government adhered to. So for example, there was a rule proposed by the government that said every single room and every building has to have at least one hour of sunlight throughout the whole year. Now that sounds like a good idea. Like I want to have sunlight in my house. Sunlight's a nice thing. And even one hour almost seems kind of low, but the issue is that China is a really large country and goes very, very far north where there's actually just not that much sunlight at all during much of the year.

And so there's some cities in Northern China that were forced to build the buildings extremely far apart so that the angle of the sun would like properly hit the inside of the buildings for like the minimum number of hours a day. And what this meant was that cities in the north are much less densely populated and much more spread out than the ones in the south. And it correlates almost perfectly with this angle to the sun. And what it means is like this has a lot of other implications for the cost of infrastructure and all of these trickle down effects that weren't really conceived of before. You know, when they put this rule in place, they weren't trying to say infrastructure in the north has to be extraordinarily expensive. They're just trying to get everyone to have sunlight. And so he came in and sort of noted some of those rules and said like, this is actually hindering development in these places because this is a limit that is not going to work out.

So in more market-based economies that probably most people nowadays are more likely to live in or be familiar with. What is the role of an urban planner? What do they actually do?

Well, I think Alain would say that historically urban planners in non centrally planned economies still think of themselves as central planners, even if they don't explicitly say so they still think that if they put a rule in place, it will be followed and it'll work out the way they're imagining as opposed to thinking of it as a dynamic system that will react to the rules and sort of mold itself in a way that has a lot of unintended consequences. So I guess there are a lot of urban planners still that think of themselves as architects who can like shape a city in exactly the form they want. Something like a Disneyland, but I think Alain would say, and I would strongly agree that urban planners should think of themselves more as like protocol creators in the way that a software engineer might design a protocol, but not say everything on top.

So TCP/IP is a brilliant design because it's not that opinionated, it's only opinionated about the things that need to happen to help people coordinate. So a city that I think has done this really well is New York City. In, I believe it was 1811, the city put together a master plan that laid out the grid that we all know today of, you know, streets and avenues. And you can actually see which parts of the city were created before. That plan was in place in the Southern tip of Manhattan. They're all this warren of streets that is, I think, beautiful, but also quite messy and like hard to get around. But then everything north of that is a grid very, very precise and something that the New York City plan did really well, I think is make it very clear from the get-go what was public land and what was private land.

So instead of saying, we're going to control everything, or instead of saying, we're going to let everyone just like be anarchists and do whatever they want. They said, we need to define rights of way because people need to be able to get around when you to keep space for like sewage and other sanitation systems that we all need. Like no one wants poop in the streets and we're going to define spaces for public parks. That's why central park is so big. They just carved it out before anyone actually started developing there. And then they left everything else to the market to decide. And I think this works really well because it enabled the key methods of coordination that people needed while also leaving space for people to be creative and to make their own idea of what the city should be.

And New York, I think many would feel, as the city, a cultural powerhouse, a place people love to visit, and many people love to live. Maybe it's also incredibly dense and incredibly expensive and dirty, and all those negative things you associated with the collection of people that is cities, but nevertheless, truly the prototype city in some ways.

And it's been an engine to pull people out of poverty for hundreds of years, like immigrants have landed in New York and poor Americans have ended up in New York. Black people ended up in New York after the reconstruction. And they found this place where they had more opportunities and they were able to like build themselves up. And like, it has a lot of flaws, but it's something that enabled both the coordination while also remain keeping space for people to make their own lives, what they wanted it to be. And I think it's just been one of the greatest engines of progress in America. And I know that sounds really melodramatic, but I stand by it.

Absolutely.

No for sure. All the more significant than that, we've conducted this sort of quiet experiment on rolling back market dynamics in American cities over the past, call it 60 or 70 years. You know, like you said, it used to be that you basically do whatever you want if you had private property. Now, the model is like in San Francisco with which we're both familiar with it, you basically can't do anything to a first approximation. Everything is set forever, don't change it. And I think we're only now starting to see the consequences of that experiment and to evaluate how well it did or didn't work.

Totally. And it's a very complicated issue. So one of the reasons I left San Francisco was this growing feeling that you're just like not allowed to do things there anymore. And for me, what that meant concretely was like, I was very active in housing policy because I wanted to San Francisco to build more housing. So more people could move there and have access to the awesome opportunities that the tech industry has offered and other industries as well. But the tech being the primary one and after several years, but I just kind of got a little down about it and didn't feel like we were making much progress because San Francisco has very strict zoning laws. It has a very granular, local control where neighbors can stop projects in their tracks that are near them or really anywhere in the city. But it has a really complex history because the place that it comes from is actually a place I agree with.

And then I think it's just gone too far. So the place that that's come from is in the 50s and 60s, American cities all over the country built many highways and the way they built these highways was they primarily tore down African-American communities, other communities of color as well, primarily African-American communities. And they just did it without really asking. They would just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.

Was this eminent domain, or?

It was through a variety of different methods. Some of it was eminent domain. Yeah. And there were a number of different ways that they could do this. And like each city had a slightly different approach. The effect was that like these highways would just cut through these communities and destroy them. So there were these things called the highway revolts that started happening in the sixties where people were saying, Hey, you're destroying my life. That's not okay.

You can't do that. And one of the ways that San Francisco reacted was putting rules in place to make it easier for locals to defend their neighborhoods and to have a voice in the process, which I think is a very good goal to have. But where that has ended up is that today one of the specific tools that was put in place is something called discretionary review. And discretionary review basically says that if you have an issue with a project as a resident of the city, you can like file a complaint and stop it, or at least force it to pause and have a hearing about the project. And in theory, that was supposed to be used by, you know, people who were getting their houses bulldozed so that a highway could go through or whatever, you know, someone's putting up like a really loud factory next to you or something like that.

But practically the way it's used today is that like really wealthy people who live in Pac Heights, Pacific Heights, which is a neighborhood in San Francisco will like complain about how their neighbor, who's building a two-story house is putting a shadow in their vegetable garden. And you know, like you don't want to shadow in your vegetable garden. I get it. But my personal opinion is that making it possible for a family to move in next to you is like way more important than if your squash gets sunlight. So it's this tool that ended up going so far as to give people local control that like completely blocked the system. And as a result, San Francisco has added far more jobs than it has housing for the last, like 10 years straight. And the housing prices just have completely shot up. Anyway, I shouldn't rant about that way too much, but the point is that it's a really complex issue where there's always a balance between local control and also maximizing sort of for the greater good and for the greater good is like a really complicated concept to define.

Yeah or, as you mentioned earlier, with the art deco buildings where there's heritage to protect, you want to protect the character of a place that makes it unique and special and not just tear it all down and replace it with highways and strip malls, which may be sometimes pure economic forces would take you in this homogenizing direction, which I think is also part of the argument against quote unquote gentrification, which is a big big talk back here in Berlin. These days, a lot of demonstrations and things. There was a five-year rent cap law that had been passed. And it was struck down by the German Supreme court. It's a real huge point of debate between the people who are here already and want things to basically stay the way they are. They want to preserve the character of the city, which I agree is very special, but then life has changed and the city should grow just like all things grow and change to be healthy. In addition to just the simple fact that we're adding more humans to the planet. And if we're going to have more humans then we also need more houses for those humans to be in. And just because you were there first doesn't necessarily give you special privileges for housing as opposed to the needs of others.

Yeah. The rent controls issues is a really interesting one because I understand where it comes from, which is we don't want people to get displaced when the place around them becomes more expensive. But at the same time, when you have rent control, I think it's akin to aristocracy in the sense of saying like you got here first, this is like your land. You have some special privilege over it. And newcomers who may also want to make their life better and may also want to have access to what that beautiful city has to offer. Now don't have access and like sympathetic to the goal of locals, locals being in a position where they can stay in their home. And I think that is a problem to solve, but rent controls are a very blunt instrument that don't actually quite do. The thing that people say that it should do.

Rent control is a tricky situation because it encourages things like landlords neglecting to actually take care of the building. I think there's other ways to achieve the same results that are also not perfect, but result in fewer issues. One final thought on that is like rent control also increases the price for other people who weren't lucky enough to be in a rent controlled building. So Berlin for instance, has a lot of immigrants who are coming in, who I think should have a home and should be welcomed, but because they weren't in a building at the time of rent control, they're now forced to the outskirts of the city, or they're forced to pay a lot more for the remaining buildings that are not rent controlled because it's rent control effectively removing supply from the market. It just sort of puts everything in stasis and people don't want to move from places, even if they need to upgrade and I'm sympathetic to the goal, but we have to look at like the outcome of what actually happens when you put something in place, not just say what you wish it did.

Some of that sounds like sort of understanding market dynamics or economics. And that reminds me of another thrust of Order Without Design, which is, he's basically talking about urban economists, which is essentially the academic study of cities and then urban planners, which in fact was what his job is, which is people whose work for governments in some form to figure out things like zoning laws in an attempt to shepherd the city in whatever direction the government would like it to go. And he talks about that, at least at the time this book was written, they didn't have good communication with each other. So planners might be not that aware of economics and kind of market dynamics generally, but then also the very specific dynamics of the role of markets in cities. And of course, vice versa as well. The academics are a little disconnected from the reality of the decisions that the planners need to make every day.

Totally. And some of those realities are political realities. Like what we were just talking about with rent control. People do not feel good when they see what they consider gentrification happening, or when they feel like they're being priced out of the neighborhood that they've lived for their whole life. And so they get angry and they want something to be done. And the problem is that doing something doesn't always make the problem better, doing something sometimes actually makes the problem worse. If you don't understand the causal model of what's going to go on. And so there's been a lot of actions that people take that I think actually worsen the situation to their own goals because they don't appreciate the level of dynamicism that's happening. So like a similar example, it's not about cities, but it's sort of similar dynamic economic system is like taxes. Since moving to Florida, I've met a lot of people who have moved to Florida from New York and California because New York and California have been hiking up taxes for companies and for themselves individually.

And I will not make any judgment about whether I agree or disagree with that. But just to make the point that like when you increase taxes, people will find ways to not pay them often. Not always, but it is a reality that you have to deal with and you can't just like moralize it and say, oh well, they're bad people for not paying the taxes that the society around them agreed upon. You have to actually deal with the problem. And so I think a lot of governments will raise taxes and then be shocked that like they get a lot less revenue than they expect because people just move away. And so cities often have similar issues. Like for instance, there's something called a privately owned public open space in San Francisco. And I believe New York and a number of other cities have this too. And the concept is you're a big developer, you're building like an office building or a bunch of condos or apartments or something.

And the privately owned public open spaces is POPOS is the acronym. It's a rule that says, if you build a development of a certain size, you have to build at least this much public space for people to enjoy in the building. Sounds like a really nice idea. And some of them actually are really nice. Like there's this really beautiful cafe in the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, that is a POPO, but there's a lot of other POPOs that are sort of hidden because the developer sees the letter of the law and they say, oh, but they didn't say like where it needs to be. And so sometimes they'll put these POPOs on like the rooftop of the building and put like no signage whatsoever for people to find it. And so it's effectively just a private space for the building. And, you know, it's a nice amenity.

Maybe the people who live in that building like it, whatever, but it's not solving the problem that the government wanted to solve when they put that rule in place. And so something that complexifies this, is that politicians and bureaucrats usually get points for starting something, but not for the actual results. And so if they say we did something to create more public space in San Francisco, people clap and like reelect them, but then five years down the line you realize like, oh, there is no extra public space really. These are really hard to get to. And people have to put together like special maps. There's all these like lists online that you can find. And there are all these like secret little nooks, which is, you know, fun in its own, right. But really not what the city was going for.

I think accountability loops is one of the biggest things missing in public policy debate or politics. And I don't necessarily think anyone's quite to blame there it's a systematic thing, but it's something where when a project like that is set up, we don't even define what success is necessarily. We say, we're going to do a project to change our spaces somehow more public space, more greenery, different transit options, but what will success be and how we measure that five years down the road. And if it's not working we'll pivot or transition or sunset the program, but that's rarely the way the government works.

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. And I think it's doable. A lot of organizations do this all the time and I'm sure that some government organizations do as well, but it doesn't usually loop back to the voters. And I still don't have a clear model of why that is, but I think it's a really important problem to solve because in the situation that we're in now, without that accountability loop, politicians who even want to do the right thing will have a hard time doing it because they'll spend all their time doing the right thing and not like doing the flashy things and then they won't get reelected. And so they'll only have their, what two or four year stints or whatever it is before they're booted out. And you can only have so much impact in that time. So building those loops is really important. And I think I've seen some cities like Singapore, for example, have like dashboards with certain statistics, which I think are an interesting start, but it's certainly not normal like a normal practice and not something that more people are aware of.

And like no person wants to create a system where they now have to be accountable because now it only increases the chance that they won't succeed at the goal. So something that has to be imposed and actually before that, even it's even hard to even agree what the goals should be right. So like in the instance of historical preservation we were talking about, different cities have made very different trade-offs. Uh, but individuals within those cities all disagree really strongly. So like Paris, for example, has effectively decided to be kind of like a living museum. There's rules like you're not allowed to build buildings that go above a particular line relative to sea level so that you can have a good view of, I can't remember which church, but like a particular church on a hill that's just gorgeous.

Is that Notre Dame? Or am I imagining that?

No, I don't think it's Notre Dame. I think it's the one on the hill with a really beautiful view of like, uh, has like this. Like I can picture it in my head, but it's not coming to me, but it's gorgeous. And you're supposed to have a view of it from roughly everywhere in the city. And that's a choice to make, you know, but the result is that Paris is extremely expensive, especially for Parisians. And a lot of people end up having to move to the outskirts or similarly, like it's tough to have a large headquarters for a business in Paris because there just aren't that many big buildings. So they've created this whole new business district called La Défense, which is like way off in the outskirts and like nowhere near the core of the city, which has big skyscrapers. And like there's a trade-off that Paris chose to make. And I think it has hurt their economy, but it has like preserved this gem of a city that I'm super happy, exists. And I'm like really glad that I can go and look at these beautiful views and beautiful architecture. So every city needs to make those choices itself and there will always be people who are benefiting and hurting from it. And it makes it really hard

One example of kind of preserving what's there living museum, like you said, versus investing in the future, which sometimes means taking risks was the building, the Eiffel tower. Uh, I read a great, uh, biography of Gustave Eiffel who's a pretty inspiring fellow, but did quite a lot of work. Um, but the Statue of Liberty and the, um, or the internals of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel tower being two of his more famous pieces, uh, but, when, you know, when they put up plans to, to build that for, I think it was a world's fair. The outrage in the city was, was huge. And even immediately after it was built, the feeling was it's this eyesore dominates the skyline. It's this super modern thing that doesn't fit with our, um, you know, quaint, uh, quaint architectural vibe. Um, and it took a long time before it became what it is now, which is this total icon that not only stands for Paris, but in fact for France. And he couldn't couldn't even imagine it without that, but that was a bold move that a lot of people were, um, were against. And so in order to, in order to build that next Eiffel tower or whatever that's going to be, you need to be willing to take risks, but then that comes at a cost.

Yeah. I think that's such a good example. And I mean, I think I should probably express that my bias here is I like building things and I like taking risks and like seeing other people take risks. And so I like to live in a place that allows that. That's one of the reasons I moved to Miami from San Francisco is it, it feels like it's more welcome here. And like, you know, Paris seems like an even more extreme version of San Francisco, but I also respect the idea of a community coming in, making that decision to make the opposite choice, but it becomes really challenging to decide like, what does it mean for the community to make the decision? Because it's hard enough to even know what one individual wants. I think let alone to capture the views of everyone. The most common form of voting for instance is like first pass the post, or whoever gets the majority rule vote.

And that works, it's like better than a lot of things, but it has a number of really important flaws. Like for example, what if the majority of people kind of like the Eiffel tower, but a minority hates it and they think it's the worst thing ever. So there's a majority that weakly would like it, but also they don't care that much if you don't have it and they voted in, but then there's a minority who's like totally harmed by it. To me, like, if you had that distribution of preferences, I would actually prefer not to build it because like it's harming people extremely in a way that no one is actually benefiting from that much. But you know, that's the values question and like designing these systems is the values thing. And I think every single voting system has like some very valid criticism that you could have.

So it's not clear even how communities should make these choices, which brings us back to markets, which I think is like something I really like about having every city make decisions differently and having a little more decentralization where, you know, a central government, like the particular country, isn't making all the rules because then every city can come to its own decision about how to make decisions, and you can end up like leaving places and making choices for yourself if you disagree with that particular place. And so by allowing diversity, it's going to create more situations that you personally disagree with, but it also create more situations that you really love and you can go live there. And so diversity is really crucial, I think, to solving this problem. And then the other piece is people have to be able to actually move. And that's really hard, you know, in a world with a lot of borders, there's actually quite limited choices for most people in the world.

I'm a huge fan of let a thousand flowers bloom, and then individual choice to kind of have a bottom up emergence of what's working or what is in turn natural sorting. But you're absolutely right. The world that we live in, that's built on nation states, which sort of assume you're born in a place and you probably live your entire life without going more than about a hundred kilometers from that place. And you have kids there and you die there. That's what I think a lot of the sort of national systems and immigration and customs systems that we have now are kind of assuming. But I think that has not been the case for awhile and that's going to become even more so with a lot of mass migration in the near future. And certainly for those of us privileged enough to be in the tech world where we have disposable income and choice of where we want to work, perhaps because we're on remote teams. It is really the case just as I decided to go to another country, not because I wanted to go to another country so specifically, but because the city I wanted happened to be located in that other country, I ran up against very much, still do run up against all the challenges, the significant challenges of being an immigrant and quite a lot of it is related to this assumption that people don't move.

Yeah. And I think growing up in a country like the United States, you have a lot of options because it's a really big country, so you can move a lot of places. But honestly, even that is very limiting to grow up without a lot of money. It's hard to move to San Francisco because it's an expensive place. And like, sure, you might be able to get a job with a high salary once you're there, but it's going to take time and you don't know, you haven't been there. Maybe you can't get jobs who knows. So a lot of people are stopped by that as well, but in a smaller country, like again, Argentina is one that I know really well. There's one really big city. It's Buenos Aires and a third of the country lives in that city. There's a lot of other cool places to be too.

But Buenos Aires is the place you want to go, if you want to have like a really ambitious career and you know, if you don't like Buenos Aires tough luck, like it's tough, you know, it's a beautiful city. A lot of people do love it. But if you want something else from your life, you want to be a Hollywood movie star. You now have to get a visa. You have to like uproot your entire life and move to a whole nother country on a different continent. And so I think it's something that we're going to have to find new models for it because what's happening now locks a lot of people out of opportunities. And I think it's honestly a moral issue. There's people who live in places with very little opportunity and they themselves have a lot of potential but they're stuck somewhere that has poor systems of coordination and they just can't get out. And so we're going to need to find new models for that, but I don't have solutions I'm just criticizing at this point.

Yeah. The mobility question is really tough. To what extent do governments have a heightened obligation to their current citizens versus future ones who might yet be born there? It might move there. That's a really tough question. I don't know. I don't think there's an easy answer, but looking within an existing polity, I think our discussion of voting and markets was really circling around the crux of the issue. The reason I think cities are so hard and potentially so much more valuable is you have this mix of public and private impact. So by public and private, I mean, a private good is something that you kind of, you yourself purely consume and the effect only touches you. Like if you consume a pencil or something, you know, by consume, I mean, like you write with it. That basically only affects you. It doesn't really affect your neighbor.

It's a totally private good. And totally public good, an example might be national defense, it's like everyone in the country gets it or no one gets it. That's not exactly true, but that's a good, it's basically purely for the benefit of the group as a whole. The thing about cities is you get this really messy mix. So to go back to your example Devon, of building a two-story building in a previously one story lot, there's a huge chunk of private benefit. You get space for the family. And there's all kinds of other secondary public impacts like there's shadow and there's noise and there's traffic. And then you're consuming some of this precious lumber off the market and there's all this kind of stuff going on. And I think the issue we have with cities is we only have a few relatively primitive technologies for distributed decision making and coordination.

We have first past the post voting, we have corresponding representatives with that model and we have call it laissez faire economics. And the pure economic model works really well for private goods. And the pure voting model can work well in cases where we have a single public good that everyone cares equally about, but we don't really have the social technology to address this mess in the middle. And that's why I feel like we end up with so much issues with cities. And then the flip side of that is I think there's enormous potential on the upside. If we have a coordination technology that reflects the underlying reality better, we could get into a much better spot with cities. I'm still optimistic that we'll figure something like that out.

I think that's really well put. And that actually clarifies a lot for me, honestly, that space in the middle is really challenging. And I think right now we have these massive oversimplifications where we just pretend like they're private goods or we just pretend like they're public goods. And they're really not, they're a mix. And so I think one of the reasons why we haven't had more innovation in those sorts of coordination mechanisms for things in the middle is that there's a limited amount of land and it's really hard to just start fresh. Like there's kind of no frontier anymore, on Earth at least. And also in combination with that for the land that does exist, the people in power would have to agree that we try a new system, which would probably lessen their power. And so they never want to give it up.

And like, you know, if I was in power maybe I wouldn't want to give it up either. I don't know. Like I think I have some pretty good ideas. So of course I should have the power, right? Like I think that a lot of people have that view. So it doesn't make them bad people or selfish necessarily, but just why would I give up control that I have. Some concepts that I've been really excited about that are a bit out there, but I think are really important for us to take seriously are the idea of building new cities and three projects in particular have come to mind. One is seasteading if you've heard of that, which is the concept of like building floating cities in the oceans effectively creating new land where there wasn't any before a second one is charter cities, which is the idea of carving out land in a place that already exists and creating sort of a special economic zone, much like how Shenzhen in China was a new experimental city that ended up dramatically changing the way that all of China works.

Ultimately, because, so some background, Shenzhen is this part of China where several decades ago they carved out this place and they said, we're going to like, kind of experiment with capitalism here. We're going to see if it works. And it worked, like really well, according to the metrics that the Chinese government cared about. And so they started adopting those across the rest of China as well. So charter cities are kind of like taking that idea and scaling it to more places. And the third one is a lot of people are really interested in the idea of going to space and going to Mars. And I don't actually know a ton about that. That seems really hard, but I think that comes from this place of people saying, you know, there's no blank slate anymore, and it's really hard to change these kinds of things and systems that already exist. So where are the places that we can create new land or create space to run these experiments? I think all of these are really, far-fetched like, I'm not sure if any of these experiments will work. I mean, I think charter cities have the most potential given that they worked in the past with places like Shenzhen or Dubai in some senses was a special economic zone. But I think the experimentation is where you get these new ideas and you develop confidence that they might work.

Yeah. And I have some optimism that we'll see experimentation in those types of new cities. I'm also very bullish on experimentation with land-like places in the non-physical world. So one example that I can kind of run through is spectrum. So electromagnetic spectrum, you need a slice of it to be able to communicate over the airwaves. Basically things like radio and WiFi go over this and it's kinda like land and that's sliced up and it's sold or licensed currently by the relevant regulatory authority. And it has a lot of the same challenges that we see with regular land. Whereas if, for example, you have naive, pure private property. You could, for example, say someone buys the slice of spectrum for WiFi a hundred years ago, and then someone else develops WiFi. Well, the person who owns that WiFi slice just got massively rich by no work of their own. Right?

That's really wealth that doesn't in any way, belong to them. And in fact, they can now not be a particularly good owner of it, but perhaps for financial tax reasons, they don't want to sell it, so on and so forth. So there's all kinds of proposals for managing the allocation and taxation of land-like things that we could try on something like spectrum first, it could be that you have a rolling auction or that you do a self-assessed value and get tax based on that. There's all kinds of experiments that I think are more palatable there. And perhaps once we see their value, where value means like basically you're unlocking a bunch of economic surplus and distributing it out to the citizens in some way, then there'll be more eagerness to backport that into physical cities where it's higher risk.

Totally. Everything you said is very exciting to me. I think there have been some experiments run on things like land, like you're talking about. And for the audience, I think the way I would characterize things that are like land are things that you cannot make yourself. Like you technically can fill and like create islands and stuff. Like basically you can't really make that much land or things that when you use them, you exclude other people from using them or ruin their experience. So for example, if you use a plot of land, someone cannot build on it until you let them. And so that combination of those two factors of like, you didn't make it. So anytime the value of it goes up, you're not responsible for that value of what you're actually going to capture yourself. But then also you're monopolizing it so that the rest of your community cannot use it. Those are things that are like land. So anything that's like a natural resource basically falls in this category as opposed to something like an idea, which is not like land. An idea that is like infinitely copyable.

I think land has this property, furthermore, where the pure raw land itself gets almost all of its value from the actions of other people. So like a given acre of land in the United States, the value of that is almost entirely dependent on where it is. Therefore the value comes from basically the people around it and all the activity that's happening. So that the reason that totally private ownership of land feels kind of weird from an economic sense is basically all the value is made by other people, yet all the benefit is accruing to one individual. And that's not the case for like improved structures in a land, right. Which should be treated differently. This reminds me of Georgism, which was the kind of policy prescription to match this worldview about land. Devon, you're smiling, maybe you're familiar with this.

Yeah. I'm a big Henry George nerd. Go on though. I'm very excited about this. Go ahead.

This was basically his belief about land was that the benefits to the pure raw land were developed by the citizens of a given polity. And therefore those benefits were sort of owed to them. So what he advocated was basically you tax the raw value of the land and use that to fund the government and you don't have income taxes or corporate taxes or whatever.

Yeah. Like concretely, what that can look like is my parents bought a house in Los Altos about 35, 40 years ago, which is a town San Francisco bay area, which is now a very expensive place to live. They bought it before. I mean, it was already kind of expensive, but now it's like really, really expensive. One of the most like expensive places in the country. And while I love my parents and they're very hardworking people who have certainly contributed to the community, the vast majority of the increase in that piece of land that they bought decades ago is because a lot of awesome things happened around them. And people want to buy that land from them so that they can have access to those awesome things that other people created. Now, my parents also remodeled the house, which also increased its value. So that's something they did.

They put a little garden. It's very nice. They themselves were contributing to the community through the work that they did, the volunteering that they did, you know, they volunteered in my schools, but the reason that property is so darn expensive is because it's where it is. And if my parents had done all of that same work and all of that same community activity in like the middle of rural Missouri or something like that, their house would not have gained value much at all. And so that's a situation where they've benefited from the system and, you know, indirectly I've benefited too, but it's actually not really just. Like, that value should actually go back to the community in the form of taxes, in my opinion.

Yeah. And to bring it back to our discussion about markets, the intuition here shouldn't be that like we should confiscate all the land or something, right. It's more that we want to bring the dynamism and the distributed information processing and the efficiency and the experimentation that you get from markets and entrepreneurship, to things that are more shaped like public goods, or things that impact many people because we have those incredible benefits in the pure private markets. And it's created an enormous amount of wealth and good in the world, right? We've had trouble with the more public domains, which by the way, now constitute most of our economy, you know, healthcare, education, so forth. We've had trouble with the dynamism and the efficiency in those spaces. So if we can find some way to bring those dynamics of the market, to these more public spaces, that could be really valuable.

So thinking about the land thing, if you've ever been a homeowner, you know, the incredible amount of pride and attention and care, you place in your own private residence, right? Like you pay a lot of attention to it. You're willing to invest in it. If we had a mechanism whereby you could get that same sort of care and attention to detail on public goods that were impacting others, perhaps because you got paid out a dividend or something, think of how powerful that could be. You know, how exactly you do it. That's the social technology question, but I'm optimistic that there's a way to make that happen.

Two ideas I've played around with which might be terrible. You know, no one's ever tried them that I know of. So the simpler one is what if people in San Francisco had shares in the city of San Francisco like equity basically. And the reason I ask question is like, right now, if you're a homeowner in San Francisco and someone builds like a big condo building next to you or an office or something, you just lose out, like it's just bad. It is actually just kind of bad for you. For the most part, you know, don't have a nice view. Your vegetable garden has shade. Like you have more rowdy neighbors or whatever, but if you had equity in the city, like maybe equity in the property taxes or something like that, your incentives would be more aligned with what's good for the community at large and what will generate more opportunities for all sorts of people and not just yourself. And so I've always thought that that would be like a really interesting thing for a city to experiment with. And something like UBI, universal basic income, might serve something like that. Though the way that people have talked about universal basic income in the past, it doesn't tie those two concepts together very well. So I don't think people would emotionally get that connection. So I'm not sure if that actually solves the problem.

Adam stop me before I veer too far off track here, but I think it was a tragic mistake to call what we currently call universal basic income that instead of something like a citizen's dividend. It's not like you're entitled to a living by other people's work. It's that the work that we all do to build this enormous amount of cultural wealth in a given polity, uh, you know, that's wealth that we're building for each other. And so it's plausible that you would get some dividend of that out to you on a per capita basis. And I think that would make a lot more sense, like this idea of having shares in San Francisco basically, or perhaps you have shares in the properties closest to you on an exponentially decaying basis. So the ones right next to you, you own a big chunk of, and the ones on the other side of the city, you own almost none of, you know, you can imagine all kinds of wild stuff, but I think there's something there.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's an interesting change on it. And I think like to put some flavor in like the idea of what are people contributing to society, cause like, you know, some people don't do any volunteering. Some people, you know, there's some people who don't work at all or whatever, and you're like, well maybe they're not contributing, but like just by existing, maybe you're walking around the street and now a woman who's walking home late at night feels safer because you're there, like, that's the kind of thing where being around other people actually has value just purely by itself. And sure everyone contributes slightly different amounts, but right now that's not really recognized at all. Everyone gets like sort of zero in return, directly. And I think it would be interesting to like experiment with that. I think it would have to be workshopped heavily. So cities, please don't take this as described, please play with it. But I think as a concept, there's something there. Another idea is like you could put more markets into the zoning code. So instead of saying things like, you cannot build buildings higher than this instead you could have like, have you heard of air rights? So you could have something more like air rights, which is basically creating property rights for the air above buildings. In different cities you can like swap them.

I mentioned charter cities earlier. I was thinking of Astral Codex 10 recently did a kind of review or overview of a charter city. And apparently the way they're doing it is what they call voxels, which I'm familiar with from my video game days, which were essentially 3d pixels. So there's one meter by one meter by one meter square voxels and property rights are not just sort of the 2d space that's on the ground, but actually goes up into the air.

Exactly. That's exactly the concept like right. We have a very two dimensional property rights system where people like own land and then some chunk of air above it. But like basically it's 2d, but there's actually a very massive simplification, especially in a place like Manhattan or Hong Kong where buildings are extremely tall. And so if you could swap those in a more fluid market, then I think you would end up with people internalizing more of the externalities that they impose on people when they have a choice. So in that example of the Pacific Heights residents, vegetable garden, they would say, you know what, it's worth a hundred thousand dollars to me for my vegetable garden, not to be overshadowed and I will pay you that money so that you don't do it. And now the person who not able to build really high will be compensated for it or vice versa.

You know, maybe the person trying to build the buildings, you know, it's worth a hundred thousand dollars to you, but it's worth a million dollars to me. So I'm going to do it. And now I'm going to compensate you for the cost that has imposed on you.

Poor squash.

Yeah. The poor squash, but it's like very expensive squash. And so I think the key idea that this is all trying to get at is like, how can you make it so that when people affect each other, when they have impacts on each other, that that person is compensated for it. And so that people actually bear the costs of like that they're imposing on other people and if they're willing to pay it, that's great. But if they're not willing to pay it, then they shouldn't do that action. So anyway, those are still very rough ideas, but I think this is why I want to see more cities pop up and exist in the world, like Prospera, the charter city because we'll be able to run these experiments and see if they work. And they might be totally crackpot ideas, but they also could be great ideas. Like democracy seemed like a terrible idea that didn't make any sense for a long time, but then some countries started experimenting with it and it worked pretty darn well. And so more places were able to adopt it. And that was only possible because there was a lot of frontier and we don't have that much frontier anymore. So we have to make our own.

So maybe before we go, I'd love to hear from each of you a city that you think really does a good job at being itself, perhaps, but in particular that manages to have a unique character and a high quality of life and be an attractive place for some certain kind of person or some certain industry through good governance through whether it's urban planning, whether it's general policymaking, as there something that stands out to you as a bit of a role model that others could look to.

The first one that comes to mind for me is Tokyo. It's, I believe, the biggest city in the world by population like 37 million people, something totally wild. And it's a source of roughly all of Japan's economic growth. In fact, like Japan is a very slow growth country and the population of Japan overall is declining, but there's still more people moving to Tokyo, which is just an astonishing fact. Something I really admire about Tokyo is that they are able to, while it's a very desirable place to live, the housing costs in Tokyo actually not that high. And it's not entirely clear to me why this is true. There's a number of things that I think contribute to it. One is that people are pretty liberal about tearing things down and building new things. And it seems almost like a cultural love of newness and people are always excited to like rebuild and create a new thing in a place where an old thing stood.

And so I think they're able to adjust as things change over time, more rapidly than cities that are more afraid to tear things down. I think it is sort of cheating in the sense that like Japan overall is seeing depressed population growth. It is declining. So that does make things cheaper. But as I mentioned at the top, like Tokyo is growing as a city. The number of people are coming in should balance that out. So think Tokyo is one of the few massive cities in the world that has maintained a relatively low cost of living. And I think that there's a lot of lessons to be learned there and how they've done it while also being an engine for economic growth.

Yeah. Tokyo is a great choice and there's lots of interesting land use law there. We can add some stuff in the show notes, but I think the short version is it's one of the few big cities where it's legal to build housing. Therefore it's relatively affordable.

Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

I just visited there once a number of years ago, but yeah, absolutely was impressed by how clean and organized the city was for being the world's biggest metropolis. And just as a small note, but it's a huge one to me and feels like something every city should adopt. They don't have on street parking. So while there are cars, each individual street, you walk down feels very kind of cozy and human scale in a way that I don't associate with basically any other city, or I associate with more of a village vibe. And I think this is just pretty brilliant transit policy and how people get around cities and why it's so important that they be able to move conveniently and safely is something we didn't get into at all and is a huge interest of mine. But that's one small example of a policy choice that just radically changes the feel of a place.

And part of why that's so important is because by not having on-street parking, they're forcing people to internalize externalities that they impose on other people. Whereas most American cities have on-street parking and it's free, which is basically sounds fine, right? Like so many cities have this, but the result is that people don't have to pay any of the costs of their car taking up space in a city. And so like in San Francisco, the square footage of renting out a parking space on the street, it's like, I don't know, 50 cents an hour or something is cheaper than the rent of an actual apartment. And so there have been like people joking, like maybe I should just like camp on a parking space all the time and like live there because it'll be cheaper than renting an apartment. And it's effectively, there's like public space that we've given up to people and said like, you can have this and do whatever you want with it without realizing that you're implicitly making a trade-off. And so, yeah, I really love that Japan and Tokyo does that.

The parking topic is its whole own interesting thing. I very highly recommend the book The High Cost of Free Parking. It's an economic and mathematical analysis of what happens when you give away, or subsidize, parking. And the short version is that every free spot in a major city is like lighting tens of thousands of dollars on fire. You can read the book for the details.

It's a great book. It's really good.

So I think for me, my choice will be Dubai, which we mentioned briefly earlier. And in fact, I've never been there, but I've read a couple of pretty good books about it, including The History of Future Cities, which covers a few very interesting cities, such as St. Petersburg and some others. And then another one that's sort of a longer history of the ruling class there and how Dubai came to be. And on one hand, it's an amazing example of human achievement and what you can do if you decide you want to, and while you have a lot of resources to throw at it on the other hand, there's a lot there that's extremely terrible. So it is this study in contrasts, but I guess I don't necessarily take it as that it reflects a place I want to live or as how we should build cities, but rather you get this sense that it is possible. We can decide as kind of societies that we want to build a city in a particular way, and we want it to be a particular way. And coming back to that kind of let a thousand flowers bloom, we need to experiment more to me, it's sort of inspiring in its study in contrasts. And for me, it sort of opened my eyes to what could we do if we were willing to think a little bit more outside of the box about our cities.

And the ones I'll pick are not perfect by any means. But I think they're very interesting and important. And those are the major cities in Texas like Austin and Houston. Texas cities, perhaps more than any other in the Western world, embrace the idea of let people do things and see what happens. So if you've ever visited one of these cities in Texas, it's highly chaotic. There's incredible amounts of cars and freeways everywhere. There's like houses next to commercial and next to light industrial, it's kind of anything goes and they're constantly building stuff and tearing stuff down. But the result is that you get this incredible dynamism and indeed people are voting with their feet to move to Texas. So I think it's at least a very interesting experiment. And I'll be curious to see how it plays out over the next couple of decades.

Well, let's wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write to us on Twitter @MuseAppHQ or via email, hello@museapp.com. You can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. And Devon, whenever you get around to starting your charter city and implementing all of your unique ideas, please let me know. I can't promise I'll move there, but at least I want to visit.

I'll definitely keep you posted. Thanks so much for having me.