Chuck Marohn 00:00

Hey, everybody, this is Chuck Marohn with Strong Towns. This week, you are going to be hearing an appearance that I made on the Yeoman podcast. Geoff Graham is a good friend of mine. He started a new podcast, said I'd love to have you on. Geoff being Geoff, the questions are very smart. The dialog is very good. I enjoyed the conversation. I think you will too. I think next week we will be back to regular programming. Let's cross our fingers. But in the meantime, listen to this extra from the Yeoman podcast. Take care, everybody.

Geoff Graham 00:42

Welcome to the Yeoman podcast. I am your host, Geoff Graham. With me today is Charles, Chuck to his friends, Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns. Let's see, what can I say about Chuck and Strong Towns? He started the organization in 2008 as a blog, and it has grown through a great effort and with a great deal of help from many, many people, dozens of employees, thousands and thousands of members, to be what I think is the most compelling and important voice in urbanism, land use, the forces that are shaping our built environment, rural environments, the patterns of human settlement. Chuck and Strong Towns—they are two of the reasons that I'm incredibly optimistic for our future, the work that they're doing.

Chuck, personally, he is the author of three books. Is that right, Chuck? Three books?

Chuck Marohn 02:32

Yeah.

Geoff Graham 02:32

Starting in 2019, Strong Towns: A Bottom Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. In 2021, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. Hopefully we will touch a little bit on that part of his story. Most recently, Escaping the Housing Trap, 2024. He's also the host of the Strong Towns podcast and has been recognized by Planetizen—I don't know how you say it, Planetizen, like Citizen Planetizen. You've probably heard of him as one of the 15 most influential urbanists of all time—of all time.

Chuck Marohn 02:32

Yeah.

Geoff Graham 02:37

Which is a long time. I think that's true. That's totally...

Chuck Marohn 02:32

There's some recency bias there.

Geoff Graham 02:37

Maybe. That's two times I think, 2017 and 2023. He lives in his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota with his family. He is married to his high school sweetheart. He has an office in the redeveloped part of his junior high, which is where he met his wife.

I'll just say to that last point about the most influential urbanists, I would say that he is right now, at least in this time that we live in, the message from Chuck Marohn and from Strong Towns is the most important message for our built environment, for our towns, for our rural landscapes. I'm excited to have Chuck with me. Thank you, Chuck, for joining us.

Chuck Marohn 03:35

Thank you, Geoff, my friend. That's a high standard to live up to, so I will try to do that.

Geoff Graham 03:43

Well, I'll try and be a good host here. I was gonna start out with a different question. People say this word all the time, and I've called myself this, but what is an urbanist?

Chuck Marohn 03:55

I never call myself that. I think one of the things that kept me away from the Congress of New Urbanism for a long time was the term New Urbanism. Urbanist to me meant big city person, person who is obsessed about a big city. I'm like, I live in a small town. I'm not that.

But in my pursuit of answers to questions I had, I wound up back at CNU over and over and over again, and I wound up with people who describe themselves as urbanists. I'm like, okay, well, maybe I'm one of them. Perhaps I feel like the term has applied to me as someone who cares about cities, city form, city life, including big cities, small towns, how the way we build, design, grow, change, adapt, mature our neighborhoods results in human prosperity and flourishing. I feel like that's maybe my core definition.

Geoff Graham 04:56

I share your reservations about that term and use it reluctantly because it feels so siloed or something. Yeah, but is there a better term for people who are working to make our human settlement patterns good?

Chuck Marohn 05:13

Well, okay, let me start off with a lack of humility.

Geoff Graham 05:18

My brother, whom we both—Chuck knows that—he calls himself a civic artist, kind of tongue in cheek.

Chuck Marohn 05:25

I like that. I mean that describes him really well. Okay. Part of my tension is I didn't feel urbanist is a good description when I first, 15 years ago, when I'm traveling around and starting to do what eventually would become Strong Towns.

When local newspapers would report on me coming to town, they would say Smart Growth advocate. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm not a Smart Growth advocate. What are you? I never mentioned the term. I never talked about it. My wife is in media. My wife was a news reporter, written back then, does radio now. She said they're just using the term that most closely associates with you.

She said, what do you want them to call you? I said, I'd like them to call me a Strong Towns advocate. I think 15 years ago, that didn't mean anything. I think today it actually does.

Geoff Graham 06:30

So maybe I'm gonna start calling myself that.

Chuck Marohn 06:30

If we're looking for a term, I feel like Strong Towns advocate hopefully will replace urbanist as the default description for how people want to be known.

Geoff Graham 06:30

I've always felt like urbanism, an urbanist is maybe someone who dwells within a city and loves everything that's happening in their city, is soaking up city life. That seemed not quite there.

Chuck Marohn 06:46

No, it seems, if you had to, okay, if you were doing marketing to an urbanist and you had to describe them in a superficial way, you'd be like, they like lattes and going to the opera and visiting the museum and hanging out in the park. I'm like, I live in a small town. I've none of that. That's not my experience.

Geoff Graham 07:08

To your point, when it has been my experience in talking about real estate development things, if you talk about urbanism to a small town person, it's kind of alienating. I don't mean that in a provincial or condescending way. It's like they don't identify with that, and it is alienating to them.

Chuck Marohn 07:32

There's a whole lexicon, and it unfortunately crosses over into our politics and our cultural discussion, which, all those lines are blurred now, of course, in the U.S. today. But there's this whole lexicon of terms and descriptors and all that that are really coded: left, progressive, San Francisco, New York, big media, all that. That language is just taken for granted by people who live in that sphere as the sophisticated way to talk about this.

But if you get to, I think, the rest of the country, I love to walk from my house downtown and go out to eat. I like to walk to the football field at the high school and watch the Friday night football game. I like to take my dog for a walk through the neighborhood or bike to the grocery store. My church is literally right across the street from my office. We walk there on Sundays. I think if you just took the experience that I enjoy and dropped it into San Francisco, you would say, oh, Chuck's an urbanist.

But if you take that experience and you put it here and mix it with everybody else who's here, it just, it's a term that doesn't feel like it's the right anchor.

Geoff Graham 08:50

So maybe good to elaborate a bit more on Strong Towns. People, if they've followed your work, they may be familiar with this, but you started your professional journey as a civil engineer. Having worked with civil engineers, particularly in the transportation world, it's often very difficult for someone who wants to build a strong, resilient place. It's sometimes a little antagonistic with the civil engineers.

What took you from civil engineer to Strong Towns? I'm really asking, what radicalized you?

Chuck Marohn 09:32

Yeah, it's a good question. I was actually a misfit civil engineer, which won't shock you at all. But when I was in high school, college, there were really two things that I would have liked to have done. The first one was get married to my girlfriend who, we talked about, I met her literally in this building, this junior high, and we dated through high school and college. We're married now 30 years. That all worked out. That was one ambition that I had that I was serious about. I love this woman and wanted to spend time with her.

The other ambition I had was really to play music. I'm a drummer. I like percussion.

Geoff Graham 09:32

I didn't know that.

Chuck Marohn 09:32

Oh yeah, man. I had a scholarship to go play music in college, and I was like, this is what I want to do. Those two things didn't reconcile in my brain. I'm enough of a—I grew up on a farm. I'm enough of a practical person where I even had my dad saying, you can't do music. You have to do something serious, and then you can do music on the side.

Ultimately, I knew I was good at math. I did two summers in the army to pay for college because my parents didn't have any money to pay for college. So if I was going to go to college, I was going to have to pay for it by myself. So I joined the Guard, and it was in doing push ups at 4 a.m. where I'm like, I got to do something serious. I can't go home to my girlfriend, my future in-laws, and say I'm going to be a drummer. I mean, what the hell? They wouldn't let me around their daughter.

So civil engineering seemed interesting to me because I liked cities. I was always interested in how things were built, how things were laid out. As a kid, I used to draw cities, pictures of cities and stuff. So civil engineering seemed like a way to take my skill at math and all the fundamental things you need and go be an engineer.

When I got that job, I liked it. It was fun problem solving and what have you, but it took me about three years to hit the limits of, why are we doing this? I remember just they would call me Mr. Why. Why do you always ask why we do this? What is it about you?

I would go to these meetings we'd be having, and I'm like, why are we doing this? What is the reason? Why can't we do it this way? After five years at an engineering firm, I was like, I've got to do something else, or I'm gonna go nuts.

A mentor of mine had been talking to me about going to graduate school to get an urban planning degree. I applied on a whim. I did really well. They let me in. They offered me a big scholarship. I'm like, well, I'm 26. If I'm gonna ever do this, I should do it now.

Geoff Graham 13:43

Did y'all have any kids yet?

Chuck Marohn 13:50

No, we were actually at the point where we were talking about kids. Maybe now's a good time. This opportunity came up, and we pivoted. My wife is a saint, just very gracious and supporting, said, go do this.

While I was there, I wound up starting my own planning firm, really working with a few cities around my hometown. Then it grew and grew, and I wound up hiring some of my classmates. By the time I got done with my graduate program, I had a firm that was approaching a million dollars a year, and I had hired a few of my classmates, and we were working all over the state, doing mostly small town planning, light engineering kind of stuff.

It was through that process that, again, I was really enthusiastic. We can help a lot of cities. We can make a lot of stuff better. It took a few years where I started to run into the, why are we, what is going on, why, why are we...

Geoff Graham 13:43

Can I ask, what years you were in graduate school?

Chuck Marohn 13:50

2000 to 2002, so just the first couple years at the Humphrey School here in University of Minnesota.

Geoff Graham 13:56

I was trying to think about what was going on, and 9/11 zeitgeist, yeah, yeah...

Chuck Marohn 14:08

9/11. Yeah, right in the middle.

Geoff Graham 14:08

Right.

Chuck Marohn 14:08

So that was a big mental shift. It's funny because I've got a 21-year-old kid who has historic memory of 9/11 but not the mental shift that we all went through when you lived through that. But yeah, that was the period of time. So my first kid was born in 2004, and I had been out of graduate school a year and a half.

Geoff Graham 14:35

I think we're exactly—are we the same age?

Chuck Marohn 14:46

I'm 52.

Geoff Graham 14:46

52? Yeah, my oldest is 21.

Chuck Marohn 14:46

So, it was actually a process in running my own firm where I got to the point where I would show up to these meetings. I think this is the vignette. I would show up to a meeting as the planner and the engineer would show up with some stupid plan. We're gonna spend a million, two million running sewer and water systems and roads all over the place as a small town with a budget of $800,000. We're gonna spend, it would be as if the City of Minneapolis just dropped randomly $10 billion on a project, proportionate to their budget. Just nuts. We're just going to do this.

Everyone would nod and be like, okay. Then I would say, okay, here's the tax base you're going to get from this. You can't even pay the interest on the debt, let alone retire the debt, let alone maintain any of this if you get the tax base that you're hoping, which is also a gamble and a risk.

I was told a number of times to just shut up and do my job. Your job is to review the permits. Your job is to do planning. Your job is not to do the engineering, and your job is not to do the financial work.

After going through that a number of times, I won't say that it radicalized me, but it got me to where by 2006 and 2007, as the housing market—because we were on the very front end of the housing market. My company was—before you can default on a house, you have to build it. Before you can build it, you got to come to us.

Geoff Graham 17:58

So you're a leading indicator.

Chuck Marohn 17:58

We were a leading indicator, and my business cratered. We went from a million in revenue to $300,000 between 2006 and 2008, so it was just gutting this thing that I had built.

By the time I got to 2008, I was mad. I've been telling cities, this is really stupid. You're gonna pay. This is not gonna work out. Then it didn't work out. It collapsed. Then the cities kind of said, well, the last thing we need is a big mouth consultant telling us how we screwed up. So I lost half my contracts.

At that point, I sat down and started to write. If you've ever been to a therapist or talked to someone who has, a lot of times they'll recommend journaling. I love writing anyway. I thought, well, this is cheaper than therapy. I'm not going to go to the therapist. I'm just going to write what I'm seeing.

So I said, I'm going to write three days a week, and that's what I did. That was the beginning of Strong Towns. It was really my way of getting what were kind of angry, frustrated thoughts coalesced and out in a coherent way where I could explain them to people, understand them fully myself, and then ultimately, wasn't my plan, but ultimately, have other people interact with them.

Geoff Graham 17:58

As a recap, grew up on a farm in a small town.

Chuck Marohn 18:03

When I say farm, Geoff, the homestead that was homesteaded by my great-great-grandparents. So not a big factory farm, a—today you might call it a hobby farm, although that's what we fed ourselves with. So that was—my dad worked at the mill and got hurt and couldn't go back, and so he actually went to school for a few years while I was growing up and became a teacher. So when I was in sixth grade, he started teaching fifth grade.

Geoff Graham 18:33

So it's good that you missed him as a teacher.

Chuck Marohn 18:36

It's very good. Yeah, that would not have—even in the same building, would not have worked out well.

Geoff Graham 18:41

Yeah, I can imagine. So kind of rural America, small town America, become a civil engineer, have a creative bent, and are in a position to be consulting to, advising in some capacity, small towns on their infrastructure and what they should do. Starting to see, hey, this stuff doesn't make financial sense. Everybody's like, you're crazy. Just do the job. And began a blog during the great financial apocalypse of 2008, and that led to Strong Towns.

A question in there that I didn't get was, you are an impressive economic thinker. Where did your curiosity for economics come from? Because it weaves into, I feel like it's the thing that most people just don't even get—economics and finance. I should say that sort of thing. Has it just, oh, read some books? Or is there more to it than that?

Chuck Marohn 19:56

Not a lot more to it than that, but I think maybe the intensity of it is what is different. As an engineer, you take a course in engineering economics, which is not, oh, here's Keynesianism and here's the Austrian School. It's none of that. It's, here's how a project cash flows. Here's what you can salvage things at the end. Here's over a 25-year life, what the net present value is. To me, my economics background was a very practical, site-oriented—

Geoff Graham 20:29

Accounting.

Chuck Marohn 20:30

It was closer to accounting than it was economics.

When I was in what I would say is the early phase of discontent with the planning firm that I had started, why is this not, why are we being asked to work on these, why are these projects not working? I realized that I didn't have the language to explain what my gut was feeling.

So I did a number of things. One thing I did is I just turned on CNBC. I bought a subscription, which was actually kind of expensive back then, a streaming subscription to CNBC. It was like 80 bucks a month that I didn't have just to stream that one channel for my computer. I just, every time there was a phrase that was uttered or a term that was uttered, I would write it down and try to figure out what it meant.

The idea that bond values go down when interest rates change. I'm like, what? Why? What's the relationship? So I started to dig into that.

At the same time, I'm a bit of an obsessive reader. Maybe that's an understatement. I'm an obsessive reader. So I spent probably two to three years reading 30, 40 economics books a year, just different people who had different takes on different things regarding economics. I mean, you and I have bonded over Nassim Taleb and how much we like his writing. I think his was part of a larger group of people that I was reading, but I found his stuff to be probably the most inspirational in terms of the questions I was asking because it dealt with uncertainty and risk and what we actually know and don't know and the limits of what we can know.

To me, those were the things that, that whole political economic debate that we have is kind of silly when you actually get down to a project in a city or you actually get down to the way we run things in a local government. That's what I was interested in. How does this stuff actually work? How does a balance sheet work? How does public accounting work? Why can cities run a balanced budget every year but be in huge amounts of debt? These things didn't make sense, and I just kept digging till I figured them out to my satisfaction.

Geoff Graham 23:14

Something I love about you and you all's work at Strong Towns is you're injecting into the conversation something about the human settlement pattern, about how we build, how we pay for what we build, or how we build this question of, well, how do we pay for it? How does it get paid for? What's going to happen when we can't pay for it anymore?

It's a topic that—you might broadly call them environmental advocates or urbanists or whatever you want to call the group who tend to be waving the flag—I don't see the, what is it, Just Stop Oil people or whatever, I don't see them saying, well, we really need to look at how we're financing this. But I feel like if people began to view so much of what we do through that lens, then the problems we're facing with our human settlement pattern will become much clearer, and the solutions will become more obvious too, or at least the direction we need to go. They're very complicated at this point, so probably not obvious.

Chuck Marohn 24:35

So I've come a long way since those early days in terms of understanding, I think having a better understanding of human motivation. I mean, I had another crisis where I spent probably three years reading psychology books, just trying to understand human psychology and group psychology. Why do we react? Why do we react the way we do?

But the early frustration was I would run into these people who I would say they were fiscally conservative, and they didn't really even care to investigate the math. There was just this underlying belief that if we were growing, it was good.

Then there was another group that claimed to be anti-growing, but they were not anti-growing because it didn't make sense. They were anti-growing because, yeah, no oil, no environmental. I found both of these conversations to be completely incoherent in a way that was, at first, maddening to me. That's ultimately why I ended up in the psychology stuff. I'm like, what? These are smart people. Why do they think this way?

But when I was in the economics phase, I was like, okay, I don't, I'm kind of a kindred spirit with the person who is saying we should be pro-growth and we should be making investments and we should be prudent about what we're doing. I'm kind of aligning with the outcomes that the people who are anti-growth want because they're like, this is dumb project. Why are we doing this?

But I don't feel like I have the same inspiration as them. I'm not motivated by the same things. Why am I winding up in this place?

The math was kind of comforting to me because I could just—I remember showing up to one meeting where the city was going to build this industrial park, and they had already built an industrial park, and they were convinced it had done really well. It's all built out. It's great. We're going to build the same thing on land we own right next door.

I showed up with the math. I'm like, here's how the existing industrial park is performing. You gave a tax subsidy to every single business that was in here, except for the public ones that you just gave the land away for free. So you are making no money off this park, and you're calling it a success because the lots are full. What kind of performative thing is that?

That was actually a moment where I looked around the table, and I said this out loud after the meeting was over, and it was not taken well. I looked around the room and I'm like, you're making money off this transaction. You're making money off this transaction. You're making money off this transaction. Everybody in here in this room gets paid if the project goes forward. None of us get paid if the project is successful.

To me, that was a big wake up moment. Okay, I get the motivated reasoning on why we don't ask these questions and why, when I bring them up, it's like I'm releasing a stink bomb in the room. Everybody's like, oh, Chuck, we don't want him at our meeting. We don't want him there. Because these were questions that had obvious answers that no one wanted to grapple with.

Geoff Graham 28:04

When you say it wasn't received well...

Chuck Marohn 28:07

That was a city where I started to get not invited to meetings that I should have been at, and then ultimately, when my contract came up at the end of the year, they opted to downsize the department.

Geoff Graham 28:26

Was this post-Strong Towns or pre-Strong Towns?

Chuck Marohn 28:30

This is, this would be 2008, 2009, so right in the time when I'm starting to write this stuff.

Geoff Graham 28:36

Yeah, well, on that sort of dislocation between—

Chuck Marohn 28:45

I'm explaining I'm a bad businessman.

Geoff Graham 28:51

I mean, you're a—I don't know if it's fair, but my perception is you have this terrible curse where you need people to be accurate and clear-eyed. You want people to understand what's happening.

Chuck Marohn 29:07

I think if I had a moral virtue that I would brag about, it is that I can't live in the dissonance of getting paid to do things that I think are not good. Oftentimes, to be a consultant, you have to be okay with that.

Geoff Graham 29:26

You're put in that position.

Chuck Marohn 29:30

I was never good at that. I had to believe in what I was doing.

Geoff Graham 29:36

I do want to kind of get on to some other things. But just as a tangent, my observation is that's really, really common among entrepreneurs and small business owners. It's, and partly why they're doing what they're doing is they make themselves kind of unemployable. That attribute might lead them to be unemployable. It's not across the board, everybody who starts a business, but they kind of have their values that they want to live their values, and it's hard for them to put themselves in a position where they need to do the—I'm blanking on his name, the guy that—it's hard to get a man to see something that his paycheck depends upon him not—

Chuck Marohn 30:22

Upton Sinclair.

Geoff Graham 30:22

Upton Sinclair, yeah.

Chuck Marohn 30:22

Can I actually take it a step further? I think there is resentment that often grows amongst people who opt for the other choice.

In 2004 when Chloe, my oldest, was born, the city here adjacent to the one I live in now, the one where my family homestead is in, it's a city called Baxter, had their city planner job open, and it was like $80,000, $100,000 a year, something like that. It was way more money, many multiples of what I had ever made and many more multiples of what I would make until two or three years ago. It was, I would have been making in 2004 what would have been good money. I would have had few night meetings. I would have had kind of a simple job.

But it would have been the yoke of doing stuff that I found very non-redeeming, being the planner for the next phase of the Walmart and Costco and frontage road expansion.

I remember going for a long walk with my wife and having this conversation about it. I felt this responsibility because we had this kid to actually do something that would make money because my consulting firm had been, in the early days, very up and down. One month we were doing well, and then the next month, it's like, oh my gosh. When you hire people, you lose money for a couple months before they become billable and all that. It was a question of responsibility for me to my family.

My wife, again, a saint, said, you can't do that. You can't do it. You will be miserable and not a good dad and not a good husband. Don't do it.

I have a ton of admiration and respect for her because while I think we live a beautiful lifestyle, it's not one where we've made tons of money over the last couple decades, but it has been one where we've had a lot of peace and reconcile the things you're passionate about with the things you get up and do every day.

Geoff Graham 32:33

Well, in terms of not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.

Chuck Marohn 32:33

That's a good—yeah.

Geoff Graham 32:33

The impact of the work is enormous. I would say you were—you had mentioned about resentment, and I thought you were going to take it in a different direction than you did. You were saying that there's resentment that fosters—resentment being in that environment. Can you elaborate on that, or did I miss part of that?

Chuck Marohn 33:02

So Nassim said in one of his books, and he said a number of times, we should be building statues to entrepreneurs because they're like the soldiers who go out and risk death and often are slaughtered.

Geoff Graham 33:17

The odds are stacked against them.

Chuck Marohn 33:23

The odds are stacked against them.

Geoff Graham 33:23

No sane person would ever pursue that.

Chuck Marohn 33:23

Yes. I do think that a lot of times, because I work a lot with government, there is a certain amount of—I use the word resentment, and I actually think that that is the right word, but I feel like a lot of people make the decision for very practical reasons. I want to pay my mortgage. I want to go on vacation, to take the path that goes against their own inner inspiration perhaps. We're 52 now. I mean, you can look around at the people who have been at that now for a couple decades of their life.

When I get together with friends or get together with people that I know or run into people that I know that are at that, "How you doing?" "Oh, it's the old grind." It's the, "How are you?" "Wow, Chuck, you're really, you've made it. It's like you're doing great."

I'm like, what? My life earnings and your life earnings are way different, and mine are not nearly as high as yours, but yeah, my happiness is probably way higher, and my job satisfaction is probably way higher. I am making—I'm not complaining about my salary. I'm making decent money now. We've grown this to the point where it's pretty stable and I can pay myself, the board pays me a decent, competitive salary. But you still have that underlying resentment of where you're at today without the recognition of what it took to be here and what trade-off you have to make.

Maybe I'm just more aware of it because of the age cohort I'm in. But I often advise our younger people on the team here, if you buy a house, you're buying the need to be stable, and the need to be stable means you might have to make different career choices. So just have that in mind.

Geoff Graham 35:20

I do think you're kind of invoking Nassim's observations about entrepreneurs. It is a great one. They're kind of artists in a way, or many of them, not all certainly, but many of them are artists. I want to shift gears and ask you something about an observation you made about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses.

I'll also ask you, maybe for people who aren't familiar with those historical figures, ask you to explain a little bit about who they are. But you have said, and I think this gets to the core of a problem you and I both have with a lot of what happens in the planning profession, you've said you can't achieve Jane Jacobs ends via Robert Moses means. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

Chuck Marohn 36:11

Didn't you also—you and I got into a vibe on Twitter a while back—governing like Caesar with Jesus in mind.

Geoff Graham 36:23

That sounds like something I would have chatted about. I'd probably have too many things on there.

Chuck Marohn 36:30

To me, it is the fatal recognition that I think the planning profession fails to struggle with. Even offshoot to that, people who I'm good friends with in the new urbanism and what have you, I think struggle with this as well because there's this idea that we're really smart people, we know the answers, and people should just empower us to do the thing we know how to do.

Robert Moses—he was originally the parks director in New York and ultimately became, I don't even know what his title was, but he is the guy who, in a sense, engineered the highways through not just New York City but all across New York State, the kind of grand planner and mobilizer of people and resources and money and institutions.

Geoff Graham 37:20

It's kind of probably beginning in the 1930s, I guess.

Chuck Marohn 37:24

Yeah, yeah, beginning then and then accelerating after World War II with urban renewal and all that. When you think about reshaping cities around the automobile, Robert Moses is kind of the archetype. I do think that the engineering profession, even though I never learned about Robert Moses in engineering school, I think his kind of thinking is embodied in what we're taught in engineering school, which is, we got to solve a problem. There needs to be traffic flow from here to here, or there needs to be a sewer extension out to here.

The way you solve the problem, sometimes you got to rip stuff down and tear it apart. Oh, that's good because we can reshape the city in a new form. We're so much smarter now. We know things they didn't know back when they originally built this neighborhood, and we can tear it down and do it right this time.

Jane Jacobs would be the antithesis of that. Jane Jacobs is very much—I feel like, and I don't think she would say this, and I don't think many of the Jane Jacobs acolytes would say this, but I feel like there's a Chesterton's fence aspect to Jane Jacobs.

Geoff Graham 38:55

Yeah, I agree with that.

Chuck Marohn 38:55

Chesterton's fence is, you come across a fence. It seems to serve no purpose. Let's tear it down. Chesterton's fence would say, well, you should probably spend some time trying to figure out what the purpose of it is before you tear it down. Or if you do tear it down, tear down a small part first and then see what happens before you rip out the whole thing.

Geoff Graham 39:01

There's a—why do you say you don't think she would like that?

Chuck Marohn 39:01

She might. It's so interesting because it's hard to read Jane Jacobs today through the lens of modern progressive thought because she is a bastion of modern progressivism. When I read her, especially her writings on economics, her writings on economics are basically Austrian School economics.

Geoff Graham 39:27

I thought Austrian School with a sprinkling of soul and love.

Chuck Marohn 39:34

I would say localism. The bottom-up grounding. There's a lot of humility there. There's a lot of, okay, I don't know exactly why this is this way, but here's what I observe.

What I love most about Jane Jacobs is how she reasons not through theory and, let me apply this grand vision to micro things. She starts with the micro and kind of almost hunts for the weird exception and then says, what does this explain? It's very Darwinian, scientific method. Okay, I'm going to observe 200 different turtles and then try to figure out what this one that is different is explaining about the rest. This is Jane Jacobs.

Geoff Graham 40:25

She has a little book on that, The Nature of Economies, her penultimate book. It's exactly about that.

Chuck Marohn 40:34

I remember I was reading one of her books I was assigned in grad school, and it had a whole chapter where she just eviscerated the Federal Reserve and the idea of top-down finance. I think she even said some line like, we've spent trillions on economists' fantasy experiments about how the world should work. I'm like, oh my gosh, what would she think about what we've done today? Because that was written in the '70s.

Geoff Graham 40:58

But I have been going down rabbit holes of people writing in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, alarmingly writing then. This is where it got like, you kids, we can't keep doing this. Like, whoa, boy. Well, if you only knew.

Chuck Marohn 41:18

I've done that too. The thing that I've tried to reconcile with today, and this really comes out of my experience in 2008, is I'm in that same mindset. We can't keep doing this. But people have been saying that for 70 years, and we've done it for 70 years. So could we do it for another 70 years? That would be the rest of my life plus some. It's possible we could. I don't think it's likely, but it's possible.

So Jane Jacobs grounds us in a certain humility that to me, it was very familiar and comfortable when I started to wrestle with it. The idea of we should want things to change and get better, but we should start as our basis a humble understanding of where we are at now and how we got here. We should work, in a sense, with the next increment of change and let humanity respond to that and use that to inform whether we're right or not or whether we know what we're doing or not.

I think this is the big schism mentally in most planners' brains. We're going to do a comprehensive plan, and we're going to set out a vision, and we'll listen to people, sure, we'll have public meetings, and we'll go through a whole visioning process. But at the end of the day, we're really smart, we're going to get the smartest people we know in a room, we're going to say, this is how it should be, and we're going to lay that out, and then we're going to stubbornly cling to it or hold up that stubbornness as a virtue as we go forward in time.

To me, I think that brand of planning, that brand of city building, needs to die, could not die quickly enough. Needs to go away and be a vestige of the past. That's 95% of the planning profession today.

Geoff Graham 43:28

Yeah, I had a back-and-forth a few months ago with a—would call this person kind of an urbanist in the broad term—who was extremely celebratory of Napoleon and Baron von Haussman's redevelopment of Paris. It's great. This person's position was, we need a lot more of that. We need a lot more of that. We need, what is the "make big plans"?

Chuck Marohn 43:57

Yeah, as if the urban renewal people weren't inspired by the same thing.

Geoff Graham 44:02

That was my reply. I was like, well, that's actually what got us into this mess—big blast radius, technocratic, top-down imposition. We had a big disagreement about it, but there was no room for—my sense was that we both share an affinity for the Jane Jacobs end, but this planner has a great love for the Robert Moses means and was just like—the response was the problem with all the urban renewal stuff, everything that's happened in the 1900s, many things that are happening still, is the technocrats weren't smart enough. We just needed smarter technocrats. We need people like Haussman. If we can only find those people and give them the power, then everything will work out.

I'm like, we don't really know what Paris was like. Old, cool medieval parts of Paris—they're really cool. They're pretty awesome. There are a great many cities all over the world that are still very medieval that are pretty cool and work really well. Are we sure that Haussman's impact was positive, and are we sure that providing the smartest people with the technocratic control over everything is really going to have a good result?

I think we just were speaking past each other. There was no getting there. But to your point, I do think that's 95% of the people in the profession, though I think it's changing. I think five years ago it was 98%.

Chuck Marohn 45:36

I'll give you that. I do think I feel like Mike Lydon with the tactical urbanism stuff has done more to kind of just shake up the conversation. It was amazing because going through graduate school, I was five years older than everybody else. Everybody else had done their undergrad, and then they went to graduate school.

The cool thing about a planning degree is that people come from all over. So we had people who had art degrees and literature degrees and political science degrees and economics. They were coming from all different professions, and they wind up in urban planning. To a person, they all, if you would have asked any of them, what's your highest career aspiration, would have been to build a city from scratch because to build a city from scratch, I can make it in my own vision. I can do it perfect. It will be way better than any that has ever come before because I am more informed, more intelligent, more thoughtful than everybody who's come before. I can do this in a better way.

I don't think that is as much arrogance and hubris of the soul as it is of the time. Because we're on this progression of progress. When we were kids, we had the Apple II computer, and then we had PC compatibles, and then we had, oh my gosh, we don't have dial-up internet. We've got cable modems. Pretty soon, you've got an entire world in your pocket with a smartphone. People who have lived through that progress, I think, just naturally think they are smarter and more informed than everybody who came before them.

I mean, I can look up right now who won the World Series and was the MVP in any year in history. Of course I know more than anybody who came before me. I've got this in my pocket. I can just look it up.

I think what lacks, and really what the urban planning profession lacks, is what I would just call the teaching of humility. I feel like I have an advantage because I grew up Catholic. There's a personification, there's a caricature of Catholicism where it's nuns slapping you on the hand with rulers. But a big part of Catholicism is a humility about what you know, the thousands of years of practice that have come before, and in a sense, submitting to that without fully understanding it as a path to some greater form of being.

That's actually a hard leap to make in a society where, wow, the smart people—everything keeps getting better and better and better. It's way easier to believe in your own innate superiority over the backward, Luddite people of pick your time frame ago.

Geoff Graham 48:50

Can I add one other thing about the Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses thing you asked me about?

Chuck Marohn 48:50

Wanting Jane Jacobs ends with Robert Moses means, one of the things that I find the greatest dichotomy is when people read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and they'll say they'll cite the sidewalk ballet. Jane Jacobs was all about sidewalks. She wrote this whole thing about the sidewalk ballet. The takeaway is, we need to build sidewalks.

So they will come away with, we need a plan for sidewalks. We need standards. We need an implementation plan. We need to come up with, here's how we're gonna, we're going to spend $2 million this year and $4 million next year, and here's our overall sidewalk plan. They'll go and implement it, and they think they're doing Jane Jacobs because they read sidewalk ballet as sidewalk.

Jane Jacobs, if she would have put one word in bold and one word in tiny subscript, sidewalk would have been tiny, and ballet would have been bold capital letters. Because a ballet is a dance back and forth. It's movement, and it's not one director. It's actually multiple people working in concert with each other.

When she talks about a sidewalk ballet, she's really talking about the complexity of humanity. If we were going to do sidewalks by Jane Jacobs, we would go out and—we got a four-step process at Strong Towns that is kind of modeled on this idea. We would go out and humbly observe where people are struggling. We would then say, okay, well, this struggle here is really related to the fact that there's a gap in the sidewalk or the sidewalk's broken. Let's go fix that. Let's go deal with that now. Then they would repeat that process over and over again.

It is, in a sense, the same underlying inspiration—sidewalk ballet—but the implementation emphasizes one word or the other. I think our planners would like to implement sidewalks where the Jane Jacobs in us should really be emphasizing ballet.

Geoff Graham 51:13

Does the riff on that a little bit—does the Robert Moses in us want to emphasize sidewalk formation, marching, marching band, some sort of antithesis of ballet?

Chuck Marohn 51:13

We have made efficiency a cultural virtue of America, and I do think Robert Moses implicitly taps into the efficiency virtue in a way that we don't culturally really question all that much. Of course we would do that efficiently.

Geoff Graham 51:32

This is maybe a turn. I would like us to be able to talk in our time together. I'd like us to be able to talk about monetary policy. That sounds like maybe a leap, but it relates to the efficiency thing. I don't think that Robert Mosesism is performative efficiency. I would say that it's an infatuation with top-down planning as a means to achieve efficiency, but it's clearly the opposite of that.

Even Ivan Illich's thing about counter-productivity, when you add up all the time that you spend working for money to buy your car and then buying gas and then sitting in traffic and going, you add up all that, and you add it together, and what's your real time, your real speed of travel? It's four miles an hour, which is about what you can do with a horse trotting along.

I feel like there's a lot—in the Robert Mosesian thing, I would like to talk to you about these grand plans, grand ambitious plans to be imposed down, and how they get enabled, facilitated, supported, financed with public debt. Given how our monetary policy is set up, I feel like you're the person who can talk about this cogently, so no pressure. So what's your initial reaction to that?

Chuck Marohn 53:14

Okay, let me give you an insight and an analogy. Strong Towns, we have 6,500 members, which are individuals who have donated to us in the last year. A lot of them are $5 a month, small donations. When we have surveyed our members, what we find is that there's a really weird, weirdly high percentage, 5%, 6%, that are computer programming people, people who do computer programming.

I have found this is not the tech bro. This is the idea with computers and programming and what have you. The way they're finding us is not because they love urbanism, although a lot of them live in cities. The reason they find us so compelling is because of that bottom-up iterative approach.

If you go back to computer programming 30 years ago, it was Robert Moses. It was get smart people, write code, pound through things, debug, figure it out. What happened is that that was seen as the most efficient way to do things. When you get to modern coding, what you're really talking about is something that's more evolutionary.

I think we're all starting to get a glimpse of this with AI now, where you'll say, okay, we're here, and we're trying to get to here. We're going to have 1,000 different algorithms running at the same time trying to figure this out. Then we'll look at the 1,000 different ones and kind of figure out which one works best. Then we'll take that one and we'll iterate that one to the next level, or take the 5% of them and iterate those up.

What you are doing is you are not, in a sense, bulk trying to ram your way through it with resources and effort and human power and what have you. You're using the machine to kind of let it grow and let it figure out. Again, it's a lot more like Darwin and evolution sped up than it is top-down God coming in saying, I'm creating camels with two humps.

I think that the mindset of the programmer is actually more attuned to the way cities are well built and effectively built and should be built—the modern programmer—than the programmer of 40 years ago would be. Of course, those programmers of 40 years ago are gone because they got wiped out and taken over by the new version.

If we switch to monetary policy, I always feel hesitant talking about this because as soon as I mention it, I'm going to get in, and you and I will both get inundated, maybe, depending on your audience, with people who have their own theories of how money works and money is a construct and we can just do, whatever.

I feel like the monetary system we have today is run and managed by people who would be the computer programmer of 40 years ago. I'm really smart. I'm going to pound my way through this. We've got a problem. Oh, here's our toolkit. Lower interest rates. Oh, we've got a hiccup over here. Oh, here's our toolkit. Print money.

I have ideas of what a modern computer programmer language, an evolution kind of system, would look like, but it would look very, very different than the one we've set up. The one we've set up is designed to me to scale a big, top-down economy without nuance.

I do think that that works for a short period of time. So you get, in a sense, efficiency, but then what I think, I think you would agree, you get this fragility trade-off. What happens is the cycles start to get crazier. The bigger amplitude craziness, and the crash is crazier, and so the rescue is crazier.

To measure that inefficiency is measuring one variable without the other. It's measuring efficiency without fragility or without risk or without volatility. It's just saying this is efficient, and it is efficient.

Right now, we're doing quantitative easing again. Why? Inflation is above target. Unemployment is low. The stock market's booming. We're doing it because it all feels fragile underneath, and there's a fear that if we don't do it, that the whole thing will crash.

The idea that the whole thing could crash as, here we've got three doors: door number one, prosperity; door number two, stagnation; door number three, total market failure. The idea that we would have a system where door number three is one of the possibilities and a serious possibility that we would need to print lots of money in a current situation to avoid, to me, that's—it's like saying, okay, we're gonna open this door. One door is health and prosperity. The next door is, oh, we struggle through life. The next door is you're gonna get mauled by a grizzly bear. Go ahead. You got one in three chance.

I'm like, I don't want to play that game. That's not a game I want to play. That's what our economy is right now from a macroeconomic standpoint.

I don't know where you want to take that, but I'm—

Geoff Graham 59:13

Well, I think that's a good setup. I was wanting to get technical, which is maybe not all that interesting, but it's something that's been a bee in my bonnet.

Chuck Marohn 59:24

Here, go ahead, and then I got a technical thing for you.

Geoff Graham 59:29

Okay, well, yeah, I want to hear that, but I'll share my sense of things. When people are—I feel like people just look at the world as it is. We go get in our car, and we drive down the highway, and we go to these things, and then we gotta, we go to the grocery store, and we buy our food that was grown in California or maybe Mexico or maybe even further afield. Then we drive home, and we do all these sorts of things. They're just like, that's how it is. It just happened. That's the natural evolution of commerce and prosperity and people working together. It has created a landscape like this where you drive maybe to the Dollar General or the Super Walmart or the Publix. Maybe if you're on a road trip somewhere, you might drive by some big, giant Monsanto field of something.

My sense is that's just not a natural thing. This didn't happen just naturally. Humans left to our own devices, living with gravity, real forces in our lives, gravity and physics—that's not what would happen. It's actually, we would continue to progress. We would continue to innovate. We would have innovations that help us lead better, more prosperous, more flourishing lives. But this scale thing of giant, massive organizations shipping stuff all over—it just wouldn't work that way.

My hypothesis is that the monetary policy we've had now for well over 100 years, but especially so for the last 40 or 50 or so, is such that it creates advantage to two things. It creates advantage, a special advantage, to those with access to capital so they can do bigger things. Then, from a public spending perspective on infrastructure, it enables, it has the public, the state, our governments, spending things to build really, really big things that I think Strong Towns articulates in really good ways. Hey, these don't pencil. Doing it with money that it has taken from the future, taken from an unconsenting future. It is operated outside of gravity in the world of physics. It's not bound by real things.

So the scale of stuff gets so giant, enormous. That is my sense, my hypothesis, that these problems of modernity, most of them that we really scrutinize, we wonder about their root cause, is this move from monetary policy-induced move from a low time preference society to a high time preference society where external costs are externalized all the time.

So I want to be able to say that in one sentence, but it took me that long to say that. What's your reaction to that?

Chuck Marohn 1:02:49

I totally agree. Let me put some meat on it because I feel like there's two examples that just jump out at me. I'm obsessed with Dunkin' Donuts, and I'm obsessed with Dunkin' Donuts not because I love Dunkin' Donuts. I like their butternut donut. It's kind of weird. We don't get them here in Minnesota.

But Dunkin' Donuts is a corporation that we all know. We've all heard of, we've all seen. But if you step back and you look at what is Dunkin' Donuts? It does coffee and drinks, and it does donuts.

Creating donuts and coffee is the ultimate startup entrepreneur thing. If you go to immigrant communities, communities that are dominated by immigrants, there's always local donut shops all over the place because it's the easiest business to start. You need a deep fryer. You need some dough. You need a display case and a cash register. Really, you can do this on borrowed money from in the mattress. This is a really cheap business to start.

So why is there a need for Dunkin' Donuts, and why does Dunkin' Donuts exist when so many local competitors to undercut them in price would be possible?

I was over in the neighborhood next to us. We have a Dunkin' Donuts here in town which started two years ago or a year ago. When Dunkin' Donuts came to Minnesota, they made this announcement, we're starting 50 franchises in Minnesota. If you want to be a franchisee, get a hold of us. Here's the requirements.

One of the requirements was, you have to have a half million dollars of liquid net worth, and you have to have $2 million total net worth. There were some numbers that were clearly not—if you take the immigrant startup person on this end and the Dunkin' Donuts franchisee on the other, these are two different. One cannot be the other.

So Dunkin' comes in and they get their high net worth investor. They start the franchise up, and then what they do is they make really good use of the transportation network that we built them. The Dunkin' up the street, I saw the other day, had a semi outside delivering their franchise package of stuff. Here's your refresher stuff and here's your coffee and here's your donuts frozen that you thaw or whatever it is. They don't make things there. They get it all delivered in, and then they prepare it.

The guy getting this was a full tractor-trailer. I mean, this was a big, huge thing parked in the alley. The guy who got off was wheeling a two-wheeler full of stuff. That was a delivery for that store. That person, I'm assuming, is going to get in a truck and drive to the next Dunkin' and the next Dunkin' and the next Dunkin'. Their day is spent going, starting at a warehouse, and then going door to door and dropping off small, basically pickup-size deliveries to all these different Dunkin's on a massive truck.

Why can they do that? They can do that because the state has built this massive interstate system. They not only allow it to be clogged with Dunkin'-level trucks, but that's actually the design. That's what it's there for.

When you get off the interstate system, we have built this massive, trillions and trillions of dollars worth of local roadways to allow them to get across town as quickly as possible with minimal conflict. We have taken all of our local streets, and we've widened them out for semi tractor-trailers, even though little kids walk across here to school. As local taxpayers, we are paying for 10 feet of roadway that we don't need and don't use, except so that Dunkin' can get their delivery or McDonald's can get their delivery or what have you.

You look at it over and over and over again. Every part of the system becomes incrementally more expensive in ways that don't provide any benefit to that immigrant starting the donut place, provide immense amount of competitive advantage to the Dunkin' Donuts. We call that efficiency because now you can have one warehouse and they can source from a handful of farmers the materials they need, and they can make the supply chain really efficient.

Okay, that's all the stuff we do on the ground to benefit one over the other, and it costs all of us, not just in tax dollars and debt, but it costs us in the community is actually worth less because you got a highway out in front of your house as opposed to a local street where people would walk business to business. Or it makes our communities less valuable.

Now add on to that the fact that 2020 we have a pandemic, and the stock market starts to drop because Dunkin' Donuts is not having people come to their donut place. So what do we do? We got to give them money. We got to bail them out. I wrote a whole article about the Cheesecake Factory. The Cheesecake Factory literally got Federal Reserve bailout money, tens of millions of dollars in money to keep them afloat because they're listed on the stock exchange, and we can't have their stock go down. We actually have to bail them out.

It's not because you can't get a hamburger locally. It's not because people love the Cheesecake Factory. It's because they're part of this system. We can wipe out every immigrant donut place. We can wipe out every local hamburger joint, but we can't let go of Dunkin' Donuts, and we can't let go of Cheesecake Factory because they are systematically part of this top-down efficient economy that we bless with cheap financing and a backstop and all of this monetary infusion whenever they run into a difficult time.

That fragile model should have disappeared multiple times in our lifetime because it did not work. Yet we have stepped in and rescued it to the detriment of all the bottom-up entrepreneurs that should be existing today in our ecosystem, providing services and goods and things that people need. Instead, those people can all go work for Dunkin' Donuts, and by the way, they'll have a 401(k) plan, so they'll be better off.

Geoff Graham 1:09:19

That is—Dunkin' is coming to create jobs. Dunkin's coming to create jobs.

Chuck Marohn 1:09:23

I had a guy who ran a grocery store. I didn't get along with him. I didn't really like him, but he was a local entrepreneur that ran a small grocery store in town. This is a city that I was working in, and a big chain grocery store came to town, and everybody was so quick to crap on the local entrepreneur. Maybe they gave $800,000 of tax subsidy to the new grocery store. The state widened the highway, made all kinds of changes to accommodate them, all this stuff. We rolled out the red carpet for this big box grocer.

People locally were like, this is progress. This local grocer just couldn't compete. He couldn't make it. The guy ultimately went to work. I saw him one night. He was working at Walmart because his business went out of business. He needed a job to take care of his family. He was working the night shift at Walmart as a manager.

To me, there's a certain—and I don't want to make this a political argument—but there's a certain, I think, paternalistic, progressive-esque, but sometimes conservative-esque, top-down, paternalistic idea that, oh, the guy's better off because he doesn't have to run this business and be worried about payroll next month. He can just work for a stable corporation, have a 401(k), have a good retirement, have his life taken care of, and everything will be good.

I looked in this guy's eyes and I saw a lesser human being, and it made me sad.

Geoff Graham 1:10:57

Sadness. Yeah, I think about that. I mean, that was the story of the pandemic, super compressed. Outstanding for the biggest restaurant chains and absolute bloodbath for small businesses.

I think about exactly that when I drive through—I've written about this a little bit from time to time—my mother's hometown. She grew up outside of Blairsville, Georgia, which makes it a very, very small place, Choestoe Valley. When I was a little kid, vibrant Main Street, all these little, all these kinds of things.

Now, when you drive through on the highway that sort of goes around the town, it's Dunkin' Donuts. I bought some bacon things there at that Dunkin' Donuts and Hardee's. There's just, it's not—every business on that new Main Street is a financialized transnational corporation.

People are just like, well, that's just how it is. That's progress. I'm like, I don't know that. That doesn't seem like progress to me. Instead of all these small business owners living in and operating within their community and employing their neighbors, now they all work for a distant, faceless group that has no—but the argument is consumer prices are low. But are they really when you add it all up? Are they really?

Chuck Marohn 1:12:26

Well, I just looked up my article on the Cheesecake Factory because it's been five, six years since I wrote this. I forgot they had spent, in the four years prior to the pandemic, they had spent $425 million buying back their own shares, which you know and I know is a way to take cheap money because interest rates were near zero, to take cheap money because they took on $1.6 billion in debt during the same period of time. To take cheap money, buy back your shares, use that to inflate your stock price and make your executives rich.

Okay, that's a strategy. I think that's an immoral strategy, but it's a strategy.

Geoff Graham 1:13:06

But it's what they're paid to do. That's exactly what they're paid to do.

Chuck Marohn 1:13:11

But when things don't work out for them, they should go away. Cheesecake Factory, Dunkin' Donuts, all these places should have failed during the pandemic. They should have gone away. They should have failed in 2008, 2009. They should have gone away. Instead, we said that cannot be allowed. That is not acceptable.

Yet every little small—I mean, we still have empty restaurants and empty storefronts from the pandemic where small businesses, local entrepreneurs were allowed to fail.

This comes after 50 years, 60 years of highways run through the middle of the city and subsidizing the whole highway strip out on the edge to the detriment of the core downtown and everything else that's here.

There's a hyper-libertarian argument that calls that efficiency, that calls that progress, that calls that a free market. I can understand how, if you bound the idea of free market in a certain price range, you can say, yes, Cheesecake Factory competes with Applebee's competes with Buffalo Wild Wings. That's a market.

But if you look at actual markets, and I think nature is the best market to look at—in nature, and I'm quoting Nassim again, in nature, you don't have all sequoias. You have a handful of big players, apex predators that survive. But for the most part, nature is dominated by small, incremental players.

When the tree falls in the forest, a new tree doesn't just come up. A hundred trees come up, and they all kind of fight. Over the course of 50 years, you'll have one that takes its place, but then the next one will fall down because it's aged out and it can't adapt.

We have created the most unnatural economy to me, the most unnatural, distorted economy that we could create. It's based on this premise, to me, that came out of the Great Depression, World War II, that really has amped up. You could see incrementally with each crisis, the kind of cultural backstop around it—we can actually countermand every downturn through monetary policy.

Yeah, I think we can, as long as we're willing to sacrifice everything else.

Geoff Graham 1:15:42

And as long as we can afford the debt service.

Chuck Marohn 1:15:48

Let me respectfully say I feel like I've moved beyond that statement. That's something I would have thought back in 2010.

Geoff Graham 1:16:00

Help me learn something. Okay. You might be right, but I think I generally think you're right about the stuff, so...

Chuck Marohn 1:16:09

I'm of the mindset that we will always find a way to kick the can down the road.

Geoff Graham 1:16:00

Really? Yes.

Chuck Marohn 1:16:09

If you say, if we can afford that forever, yes, because we are willing to sacrifice everybody who's not in the position to kick the can.

If you want to put a face to that, just take Ohio. We're willing to wipe out all of Ohio and have a huge percentage of population become drug addicts and have all their cities go bad. We did that in the '90s and the early 2000s, and we're like, oh, well, you didn't keep up.

I mean, I think as long as there are winners in a position to do this, I think that we will be—let me put it this way, I am sympathetic to the argument that at some point the bond market will flare up and tell us, you can't do this anymore. But I think that if I were to bet, if you said, Chuck, your life is going to end when the bond market cannot be corrected anymore, I would say I'll take that bet because I think it will be a long time. I think it would be far longer than the rest of my life because I think that we will—

I mean, I've done this series the last seven years about the inflation of Christmas cookie ingredients because every year, my Christmas cookie ingredients go up by 10%, 11%, and the core, the inflation number for bakery goods or for bakery ingredients is 1%, 1.5%. I'm like, they will lie with statistics. They will print money when they need to. They will tell us it's raining when they're pissing on your leg.

I don't think the failure that we will see will come from a top-down reckoning. I think it will come from, in a sense, a bottom-up revolution.

Geoff Graham 1:18:08

I hope that I'm wrong about that, and I hope that we do see the revolution rather than the reckoning.

Chuck Marohn 1:18:19

It might just be a matter of sequencing.

Geoff Graham 1:18:23

I've kept you way longer than the time I asked you for, but if you have a few more minutes, I'm good. I would hate to end on the sort of the doomer side and ask if you can share some of your reasons for optimism right now, if you have them.

I listened to your great talk with, or your great conversation with, with our mutual friend Jim Kunstler a few weeks ago. I totally love Kunstler. He's the greatest, and I love Joel's conversation. I didn't feel like you got to the point in that conversation where you all were able to trade some reasons for optimism. I'm wondering if we might have that here.

Chuck Marohn 1:19:04

I think my default position is optimistic these days. That wasn't true in 2008, 2009, 2010 when I started doing this. If I have to say what that optimism is grounded in, I think it's grounded in a couple things.

First, we do—I mean, I'm sitting at the middle of a web of thousands of people around North America and increasingly around the world that are—this might be a little strong, but I don't think so—opting out of the current insanity and saying, I'm going to roll up my sleeves and make my place better, and actually seeing real success at doing that.

I feel it is still the beginning of a wave, but I feel like it's a wave nonetheless. With what we see in terms of the exponential growth of the movement, the kind of mobilization of thousands of people—I mean, we're up to over 300 different local chapters around North America that are, these are people who are, okay, we're getting together, and we're gonna go to City Hall, and we're gonna go take care of the park, and we're gonna basically rebuild civil society at the local level in the absence of any coherent thing that is doing that.

There's so much untapped capacity in this country, and there's so many people who are ready to do it that I think all they need is often all they need is for us to give them permission. I don't, just go do it. Yeah, you can do it. Here's someone else did. Just copy what they did. Go do this.

We have created a society where we have a lot of spare parts and unused capacity and people who are underemployed and cast aside and not valued economically. Even the guy working at the Walmart that I brought up earlier—these are all people waiting to do good.

To me, that well of capacity gives me a lot of optimism.

I think the other thing too...

Geoff Graham 1:21:12

Do you kind of, before you go on to the next one, can I ask you to—I totally agree with that, and I'm particularly excited about Gen Z. I'm particularly excited about young people.

Chuck Marohn 1:21:25

Okay, this is what I was gonna say next.

Geoff Graham 1:21:33

Because I've got these two kids that are Gen Z.

Chuck Marohn 1:21:38

I'm aware of my own bias in this regard. Are there problems? Yeah, totally. Do the zombie kids on their phones freak me out? Hell, yeah. Does the fact that we teach kids in school now on computer freak me out? Yeah. This is not good.

But when you actually talk to them, and I mean my youngest one graduated from high school last year, so I'm kind of out of the active parenting mode where I'm brushing up against all of them all the time, but when you talk to them, they're not dumb. They're very aware of how social media manipulates them. They're very aware of the current political environment. They're very aware of the fact that parts of the system don't work and don't work for them and are designed basically for boomers. They need to do something different.

As an echo of our generation, to me, the great thing about our generation is the latchkey kid kind of turned into the resilient kid and the resilient adult and the one who, if you're in a bad situation, you want a Gen X person because they're realists. They'll get stuff done.

I feel like, as an echo of us, they have a certain amount of that characteristic to them that makes them endearing to me. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and I'm going to do this. I'm ready to take on. I'm not expecting things to be handed to me.

When we look at the boomers and the millennials, I think that there is this, again, kind of echo of things were easy, and then things should be easy. In the millennials, why? Why aren't things easy?

I think both of them, I mean, I've said this many times, if you're not frustrated with the generation ahead of you and you're not bewildered by the one after you, you're probably not paying attention. I think that's probably a common thread throughout modernity. So I have no doubt that if this was two millennials talking, they would have lots of complaints about us.

But I find that next generation, that Gen Z, just really to be an optimistic one and one that I think is practical and ready to roll up their sleeves and deal with problems. I think they're the exact right people to be hitting the early part of the workforce right now because they're resilient, they're scrappy, they're going to try things, they're going to roll with punches. I like them.

Geoff Graham 1:24:33

I feel like part of that, part of what I'm so excited about for them, for us, is their spirit of bottom-up, which is maybe they've lived through—they've been aware and been paying attention through a time when top-down so clearly failed. It is so clearly failed that many of them at least seem to just not even concern themselves with the—they're kind of ignoring the bottom-down or the top-down and intuitively, especially interested in making a bottom-up revolution.

Chuck Marohn 1:25:16

The interesting thing, these are people who—you and I were Reagan, Bush, Clinton. There was a certain overlay of functionality and the discourse.

When you have basically kids who have grown up with the end of Obama, Trump, Biden, now Trump again, even the ones that come to me like, oh, we need the federal government to do this and that, the minute you start engaging with them, they're like, oh, yeah, that's really dumb. We should be out building this in our city. We should be doing this here.

They're very quick to move to, what can I do in the place that I live, that is different than millennials? A lot of the millennials I talked to are really look to the top-down system kind of by default. I do think that that is an echo they've inherited from their boomer parents largely.

But let me put it this way, and Kevin Klinkenberg has got into this too. I actually think he's an interesting one you should chat with because he's kind of delved into this. He's a—I don't feel like I'm a Generation X booster. I don't run around going, Generation X is awesome.

Geoff Graham 1:26:28

I talked to Kevin, by the way. It's like episode single digit.

Chuck Marohn 1:26:32

Oh, you did. So yeah, Kevin is, I think, does a really good job of describing the attributes of Gen X that makes it really good for leadership in this moment because in a lot of ways, we're reluctant leaders. We're people who will lead if we have to, if things are screwed up, but we're not jumping and dying to lead.

I feel like that Gen Z echo of our generation really has that same mindset. Right now, we do just need people who go out and get stuff done.

Geoff Graham 1:27:05

I feel like that's there. An additional thing that the generational thing, that the tide is sort of coming in our favor. Then another thing that I tell people about that are younger people who seem concerned or not—concern is not the right word—but the challenge is enormous or are feeling a bit overwhelmed with the challenge ahead that we have in making our world a better place for us in our future, is the dialogue.

That you and I are not—that you and I are having this conversation today because we probably would have had this conversation very similar 120 years ago or something similar—but that so many people are talking about this right now that it's so many people. Whether there's a thriving yimby movement, for all a lot of misgivings about it, or whether there's this interest in regenerative agriculture, or there's questioning whether, it seems like we are moving together as a people in a really, in a beginning to move in a really positive direction. As many people are in this period of institutional turmoil we have, we're losing faith in these institutions that are supposed to come save us but gaining faith and confidence in a bottom-up revolution.

Chuck Marohn 1:28:37

I don't think—I want to temper that, but let me give a slightly different spin because I wrote an article towards the end of last year that ran, I can't remember where it ran, but it was about Gutenberg and the idea that we created the printing press, and kind of what we're taught in junior high is, create the printing press, you get the Reformation, you get the Enlightenment, you get modernity. It all flows from the sharing of information. It's a really nice story, but what it leaves out is the hundred years of revolution and bloodshed and trial...

Geoff Graham 1:29:19

Yeah, go ahead, yeah.

Chuck Marohn 1:29:22

So I look at today's moment as being, in a sense, similar in that we have this disruptive technology that allows us to communicate without the gatekeepers of the past. The gatekeepers in the Reformation would have been the Catholic Church and the aristocracy.

Today, the gatekeepers are mainstream media and official government institutions. During the pandemic, it was the National Institute of Health. We're having dialogue now outside of that, and it creates a lot of chaos and a lot of turmoil.

I do think there's an open question, and I am optimistic about this. I think what you saw with Gutenberg was this period of intense chaos and then new institutions forming that were, in a sense, consensual institutions, a media, the press, newspapers. You had certain institutions that formed from a government standpoint.

I think that we are in this process of tearing down and reforming. I'm optimistic about the nature of the medium. It's not social media so much, but the idea that we can start—oh, I've got an interest in drumming of this style. With the, you can actually have subgroups of five people from around the country who are interested in the same thing, who can meet regularly and talk about whatever that is.

I'm not naive enough to think that this disaggregation into tiny subgroups can't be manipulated or can't be misused or can't have a big macro overlay that is Orwellian. But I do feel like the institutions that will come out of this chaos are going to, by default, be more bottom-up, more democratic, more participatory.

Not in a "I show up and give my opinion," but I actually bring a shovel and a rake and do something. I think that that is a more de Tocqueville kind of America. I think it's a more participatory America, is a more Strong Towns America. I think it's a better place for everybody, but we got to get there first.

Geoff Graham 1:31:50

Yeah, and we will. That seems like a great place to wrap up this conversation. I do, I can talk to you for hours and hours and hours. Before we officially wrap it up, Chuck, can you share with people where they should find you? I think it should be obvious, but yeah, go ahead.

Chuck Marohn 1:32:13

strongtowns.org is our main website. We tell people plug in on the social media feed of your choice. We're on all the major ones. You'll find us. We've got four different podcast streams, so if you just type Strong Towns podcast, you'll get the main podcast that I do, but there's a bunch of other ones.

Yeah, if you want to really be in the know, you can sign up for email on our site. We got a really active email list. If you want to support...

Geoff Graham 1:32:39

If you're in a decent size market or maybe even a very small one, there's probably a Strong Towns group in your town.

Chuck Marohn 1:32:47

Yeah, strongtowns.org/local would be where you'd find that. Yeah. So there's lots of ways to plug in, and we love people who are ready to come to the table with that shovel and start digging.

Geoff Graham 1:33:02

Chuck, thank you so much. I've loved having this conversation. Thank you, friend. I hope to see you soon in person.

Chuck Marohn 1:33:13

Likewise. It's been too long.

Geoff Graham 1:33:18

Well, I was gonna say the last time we got together was at your place a couple years ago, which was fantastic.

Yes, we keep wanting to put another one on the calendar. It's between—this is an event my brother and I with my dad, my late father now, but we produced a few years ago called the Ion Dialogues, and we got some of the just the greatest people in the world to come and talk about really wonderful stuff. We'll get another one on the calendar. It's sort of that's in my to-do list.

Chuck Marohn 1:33:43

Well, we'll try not to wait for that.

Geoff Graham 1:33:46

Okay, good. Yes, that's, I like that. My guest today has been Charles Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. Thank you, Chuck.

Chuck Marohn 1:33:46

Thank you, friend. Take care.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 1:34:00

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.