Chuck on Data Centers, YIMBYs and E-Bikes

Chuck Marohn

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn with Strong Towns. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. I have not done one of these late-night podcasts for a long time, partially because I've been trying to do fewer late nights. But this has been a crazy day, crazy week. I have so many things that I want to share with you that are big-announcement kinds of things that I actually can't share with you yet. That was kind of mean to say up top, but it's why I'm here late at night. There's been a lot going on, and it's really exciting and really fun.

I will get you that shortly, but first I want to say I'm about to do something that I have wanted to do since the earliest days of the podcast that we've never been able to pull off, and that is answer questions from listeners. It sounds easy. Maybe other podcasts do this better or do this easier. We have always struggled with this, really struggled with this.

I remember early on doing a call for questions. Love all of you. You're wonderful. I'm seriously not just saying that. Whenever I meet listeners of the podcast, whenever I meet Strong Towns members, they're the kindest people. I love you all. But you've got your things, and you can get a little bit wordy. We would get the request sent in: Here's my question. It'd be, dear Chuck, two paragraphs about how I love Strong Towns and the foundation is so nice. It's so wonderful. Then let me tell you a little bit about me. Then there's four more paragraphs, and then let me get to my question. There'd be five paragraphs and attached sheets and all this stuff.

I love it. It's very nice. I love the passion. I could not answer those on a podcast. We actually tried once to do a phone number that you could call in, a voice box, and leave your message. That was equally bad. I think we cut it off at 60 seconds, and people were getting ticked off because they had just started with their question. I can't play five-minute questions on the podcast.

As many of you know, this year we launched the Strong Towns Commons. The Strong Towns Commons is where we are pre-publishing my columns, where we're doing the discussion that used to be at the end of all of our stuff. That's now happening on the Commons. It's where we're hosting our Locomotive sessions. It's where we're doing our weekly Strong Towns Anything. There's ongoing discussion there. Strong Towns is not the only one adding content. Our members are adding.

If you are a Strong Towns member, go to commons.strongtowns.org and log in. More than a thousand of you have logged in now. That means about one out of six members are currently part of the Strong Towns Commons. If you are a member, head there and log in.

This last week, I posted a little thing and said, hey, if you've got a question for the podcast, put it in here. Keep it short and reasonable, and I'll answer it. Guess what? Tons of really good questions. I love the Commons. I really do.

I tend to write my Monday column and have it done by Tuesday or Wednesday of the week prior. Sometimes Thursday, but usually by Tuesday or Wednesday, I will share it in the Commons early and ask people to give me feedback and help make it better. Guess what? People do. It's really awesome. People give me really good feedback and help me make it better. By the time we publish it, there's a comment thread and discussion thread already going on it. It's pretty cool. I love the Commons. I'm having a ton of fun there, and I love hearing from people.

So I have three pages of questions that I'm going to do my best to answer. I do have a timer going, so we're going to go roughly an hour here. If I don't get through all of them, we'll do this again soon, and I will try my best to get through it then.

I'm going to start at the top. Aaron C. Just a quant nerd. I said one question. Aaron's got two questions. We'll take both of them. I think they're both really good.

This first one is: What's the minimum a city should demand from developers before approving a data center? Just jump right in the deep end. I wrote an article about the data center here in Hermantown, Minnesota. Hermantown's a couple hours away from here. The argument I tried to make in that is kind of the reverse argument that I've made. To me, it's the same argument, but I think a lot of people took it as the reverse argument I've made from the statewide housing preemption argument.

The argument I made on data centers in Hermantown was that this is a decision that's too big for a city to make, particularly a city the size of Hermantown, which I can't remember, 6,000, 10,000 people. It's a small town. They're getting something like $130 million of infrastructure. This is for a city that spends a million dollars a year on infrastructure. So they're getting that gifted to them, which is, yay, we're getting all this new infrastructure. But of course they've got to maintain it. They've got to take care of it.

There are a lot of reasons to have qualms about data centers. I'm not going to weigh into all the moral implications, the water usage and so on. I'm going to stick to Strong Towns core infrastructure, city development kinds of issues. I feel the biggest concern that I would have in that framework is that you are building something that has a relatively short shelf life.

You're building something in the tech space. Whatever chips we put in there, whatever technology is dropped in, I'm not saying it's going to be obsolete in five years, but we all know how fast technology changes. It's not going to be state of the art in five years, and at some point shortly after that, it is going to be obsolete. The question that I have, just from the city standpoint, from a land-use standpoint, is how long is this operation going to be viable?

We had a group here in Brainerd that came in. They ultimately got approved after I was gone from the planning commission. It wasn't the first one, but it was the second one that got approved. It was a group that wanted to do crypto mining. They wanted one of the business park lots subsidized for free, what have you, and then they wanted a big contract where they prepaid for the electricity, which is basically: We're going to own the electricity, and then the current users will get whatever's left over.

That's how the contract was written and signed. That's how these are always done. They basically prepay up front for a certain amount. They don't use that amount right away, but they eventually work up to it. When they do, the contracts are written where they get the power generally first and then everybody else gets squeezed out.

My biggest concern was, during that period of time when they were ramping up, what would this do to our ability to hook up other users and provide power? That was never answered satisfactorily for me. I raised the issue. I don't have enough detail to say whether it was answered satisfactorily or not.

The other issue that I had was: What's going to happen to this building once this is not the thing anymore? In a lot of places, if the technology is old and obsolete, if the technology needs to be traded out, if there are limitations here on the site or what have you, it's just easier to go build a new one. We see this with Walmarts and Targets and big-box stores and what have you. It's easier to just build a new one up the street than to rehab the one that you have. That is with lower operations and maintenance costs than what you would have in a data center.

So if you put a gun to my head and said, you are the king of this city and you have to approve a data center and you have to write a contract for them, I would basically want two things. I would want all of the infrastructure that I provided to be temporary at my discretion. I would want them to pay for the disconnect of anything that's not viable once they were done. I would want some kind of bond to be able to undo that commitment. The first one would be at my discretion: I want that pipe, I don't want this pipe, that kind of thing.

The other thing that I would want is a bond for the reclamation of the entire site. It's kind of like a mine. We're going in and we're mining, and we've got all this stuff left over, and then we're just going to walk away. No. We require mining companies to restore the site. I look at this as a mining operation. We would want them to restore the site.

You've got to take out all the gear. You've got to take out all the stuff. You've got to properly rehab the site. You've got to put it back to the way that it was, so when it's done, it doesn't just become this big, huge, derelict site full of what would essentially be hazardous waste.

Understand, most of these, they're not owned by Meta. They're not owned by Google Alphabet. They're not owned by Amazon. They're owned by LLCs, subsidiaries, or companies that develop them and then rent them out to Google. That creates a little ability to walk away. This is actually what happens with mines. The mining company doesn't own it, or when they get to the end, they sell it to a separate entity, and then that entity takes the cleanup costs and they file bankruptcy and go away, and the big entity sits over here protected. I would want all that bonding capacity so that did not become my problem at the end.

All right. One question and we're 13 minutes in. I will try to do this better.

Aaron's other question is: What is an issue or policy where you feel Strong Towns was wrong in the past? What did you learn from that experience?

It's funny because I had these questions ahead of time, but I actually just had them. I didn't really look at them or think about them, and of course nothing is coming to mind real quick.

Look, Strong Towns is based on me changing my mind. When I was an engineer, I thought I was doing great work. When I was a planner, I thought I was doing great work. Then I went through this period of time where I started to question the things I was doing and ultimately came to Strong Towns through that mechanism. I think if you force me right now to say, what's something that we screwed up?

The one that's fresh in my mind, just because it's been such a thorn in my side this week, is the YIMBY conversation. When I first heard the term YIMBY, my initial gut reaction was, yeah, that's exactly what I am. That's me. I am a yes in my backyard. Let's go. Strong Towns has from the very get-go been about incremental housing in every neighborhood, everywhere. Every neighborhood needs to evolve, adapt, change. That's us. I'm like, I am YIMBY. That's me. It's describing me.

Then I started to meet other people who describe themselves as YIMBY, and I retraced my steps from Strong Towns as a YIMBY org to Strong Towns wants nothing to do with whatever that is. I think in a lot of ways that was an overreaction. To me, there are some really bad players in this. I'm not going to go on and name names, but they make themselves evident if you follow them. They're people who tend to demonize, attack others, not deal with ideas but deal with personalities. It's ugly at times, and I find it really gross.

But there are a lot of YIMBY organizations, organizations that identify as YIMBY, that are doing fantastic work, that are doing really good work, that are well aligned with what we wanted, what we would like to see. If not perfectly aligned, then the Venn diagram overlap is big enough to where we should be friends. We can find most things that we agree on.

I do think, just a little bit of inside baseball, we internally had to deal with this too. This may shock everybody, but I am not the only decision-maker here. In fact, I am one decision-maker of many. I have a board of directors that I am legally responsive to. They are my boss. They can decide tomorrow that I don't have a job. Now, they're not likely to do that. We've got a very good relationship. But part of what makes that relationship work is I do not consider myself above them. They are my boss. I work with them. I'm deferential to them. I include them. They are part of the policy discussions.

I will say we've had a couple of years where we had to work through not two views, but multiple views, I would say three or four very strongly held different views about how Strong Towns should approach, not housing so much, but the entire YIMBY political conversation.

I would say that in the last six months, nine months, the internal messaging on that has become more coherent. We all, because we have a lot of faith in each other, because we have a lot of deference to and collaboration with each other as a group, have really worked to find ways of talking about and ways of understanding each other that are common. I think we've come a lot closer.

A year ago, I felt tension with numerous people in the leadership of the organization that I wasn't seeing eye to eye with. Today, I don't have that tension. I do feel that is an issue that we have struggled to handle well. I think along the way we probably made some messaging mistakes, things that I would do differently today, and I think we're in a better place now.

So I promise to be faster, and I'm not. All right, let me keep going.

Nathan H says: How do you think North America's development patterns might become more distinctive as individual places take a Strong Towns approach? He talks a little bit about freeze-thaw cycles forcing roads to be built to higher standards, that forcing intensity of development, and on and on.

What other examples can I think of? I think this is an interesting question. What I actually find most interesting about the idea behind this question comes from Steve Mozan's book, The Original Green, which, by the way, is one of the greatest books ever.
We have a Friends of Strong Towns membership program. It's a tier of membership where you are committing a little bit more to financially supporting the movement. One of the things we do with that group is a book club, and we sent them all The Original Green. I was so proud to do that because I think the book is beautiful. I think it is well-written, heartfelt, thoughtful. I really love Steve, and I think that he is a humble genius in many ways.

What I got most out of his book was how people of the pre-suburban experiment, or pre-modern industrial development, pre-Levittown ways of doing things, had to adapt their buildings, their cities, their structures, all of that to their natural habitat. Cities are human habitat. When we had to build in concert with our habitat, we just had to do things differently.

Steve talks in the book about houses in the South being situated in certain ways to catch the air coming through because they didn't have air conditioning, but it was really quite hot. The whole way you would do front porches. He talks about the roofs. I remember when he had this story about this bell roof. Why would they have this bell roof? It was to, in a sense, slow the rain as it came off the roof because it was in a very rainy climate.

Here in Minnesota, I live in a house that was built in 1914. We have air conditioning. It's Minnesota, so it doesn't get super hot here, and in the summer we don't use it all that much. Most days we just open the front door and open the back door, and the wind flows right through the house and keeps it really cool. It's really nice.

The way the house is situated, in the winter we get the sun from the south. In the summer, it's a little bit higher and we don't get it in quite the same way. It is, to this extent, designed with the place.

I don't know which of that will come back, which of that will be restored. A lot of that's going to depend on where the energy story goes. I think it's a big open question. Are we on the verge of an energy revolution where we've got unlimited energy, in which case you'll have your own thermostat in every room and who will care? Or is it going to go the other way, where Russia-Ukraine war, Strait of Hormuz, oil is going to collapse, we're going to have a completely different economy, and our relationship with energy is going to change dramatically? I don't know. I think a lot of this is going to depend on that kind of thing.

My daughter right now is in Arizona. She's in college at the University of Arizona. She's starting her sophomore year. I have long been interested in the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead and that whole Colorado River ecosystem. There are reports in the last couple of weeks that they may have to shut down electrical production from the Hoover Dam because the water levels are just too low. I think those kinds of things will force harder decisions before our development pattern, which is very slow and takes a long time to change, shifts in any major way.

Let me move on to Marty K. Nathan was an LC leader. Marty K. says, carpenter, eco-village enthusiast. Awesome. Thanks, Marty.

I don't understand the first question: What is the role of the hearing examiner in the development process? I actually don't know that term. The second question here I think is one that I can answer: What is Strong Towns' perspective on tiny homes on wheels and ADUs, particularly as state and local governments work to make these housing types more broadly legal and accessible?

Okay. Tiny homes on wheels. Let me say what I say in the Escaping the Housing Trap book talk. I think that "tiny home" is a really bad phrase. This is maybe the negative reaction I'm having to the tiny home on wheels. It almost feels like a circus exhibit. I call it a fetish: Hey, look, poor people live in tiny homes on wheels.

I think what we really should be describing in terms of tiny homes is just a starter home. It is dark tonight, so I can't see across the street. But during the daytime, if I looked out my office window, I'm in a former middle school. If I look out my office window, big schoolhouse windows, there are a bunch of homes across the street. Many of those, I might even say all of them, started as starter homes. They were probably 500-, 600-square-foot homes. Now they've been added on to over time.

What do you do with a 600-square-foot starter home? You've got a small house. Then when you have a kid, you put an addition on the back. You have another one, you put on a second story. You save up a little bit of money. The neighbor comes over and helps. You go help the neighbor. This is a story that we all understand.

Should we be building starter homes? Yes, all over the place. Every community should have them all over. Andrew Burleson, our board chair, did some math in Denver. He looked at what Denver's supposed supply shortfall is and said, okay, if this is true, this is a real number, and I'm not doubting it. I just didn't do the math myself. He took the number, this is our supply shortfall, and asked what this would mean in terms of starter homes or backyard cottages. Basically, it was that you would need to build one per block every year for the next three years and you would make up that entire gap. It was some obscenely small number.

Yes, we should be building tiny homes, starter homes, all over the place. I think the whole idea of them on wheels is where you've crossed over into a novelty act. I said a fetish, a circus-clown thing. I'm not saying it has no value and I would never consider it and it's just really dumb. But why don't we just build dignified homes that people can live in, rent, buy cheaply, affordably, and let them get started that way?

It's not that we don't have the land. It's not that we don't have the room. It's not that we can't go down a street in literally every city in the country and find places where these would tuck in very nicely and very easily. To me, these are cornerstone housing types. These are the housing types that we should really be looking at doing at scale, but drop the whole thing about wheels. Just build a real house.

In my presentation, I have this thing that I do where I say, in my community, I'll put a picture of a starter home up on our slide. I'll say, in my community, we call this a tiny house. My ancestors of the same community would have called it a house. Let's not make a fetish out of these things. Let's just go build good starter homes and get people into them. I think that'd be great.

All right. Saeed V., an LC leader, asks this: What do you think about the idea of neighborhood co-working spaces as a compromise solution between work from home and coming to the office? Are there benefits to the local economy?

I think these are awesome. The idea of neighborhood co-working spaces doesn't need to be thought of as a compromise. I think it should just be something that would be very normal and acceptable. Let's describe this. What we're describing here is a use scaled to the neighborhood.

I live in North Brainerd. It's all single-family homes, some duplexes, some quad units. I'm going to tell you, you can walk through the neighborhood and unless you're looking, it's going to all look like single-family homes. I can point them out to you: That's four units right there. That's two units right there. I've got a six-unit. There's one in the neighborhood. But the typical person going through the neighborhood, the typical resident driving through the neighborhood, is going to see all single-family homes. That's what they're going to see.

If you came and said, we're going to build a co-working space, it's going to be a four-story office-type building, I would say, okay, it's not super offensive to me, but good luck getting that passed. That is going to raise all kinds of issues. It would be kind of dumb here anyway, because the land values don't really justify that level of investment. It just doesn't.

But what would be viable in this neighborhood? Taking an existing home and turning it into a co-working space, taking empty space between two places and building something that would be scaled with the rest of the neighborhood but have it serve as an office space as opposed to a house. Cool.

We've got a senior center in the neighborhood. It looks kind of like a school building. I think something that looked like that would be really cool, that had co-working and office space and is scaled to the neighborhood. It works.

We actually have an old school the school district abandoned and was going to tear down. Some people in the neighborhood before I moved in here were able to get it saved, along with this school that I'm in now. This one they turned into artist studios and live-work artist studios. Half the building is people who live here who are artists. The other half is artists like me. They've been really kind to have me here. I write and do podcasts and what have you, so they let me come here and do that.

The other school is actually now a charter school, so it's still serving that function. If that charter school were to end and they were to turn that into a co-working space, I think it'd be awesome in the neighborhood. To me, the issue here is really about scale. It is going to fit in and be compatible if the bulk is similar to what the rest of the neighborhood is, if it has the characteristics of a neighborhood kind of function.

If you put a Dunkin' Donuts in the middle of the neighborhood and there's 4,000 cars a day that would not normally be here driving through, that's different. But if you've got something where people drive to work, park, drive away, there are plenty of parking spaces in the neighborhood. The streets are all empty. You could park on all of them. It'd be really easy to do. Not a big deal for an office space. It's not going to have a ton of traffic.

I think this would be awesome. One of the greatest things about living in the neighborhood that I do, my house is five blocks that way, so I can just walk back and forth all the time. It's really a delightful walk. I walk right by my church, then another block and I'm in the park, the beautiful park in the middle of town. I walk through the park, and then I've got another block and I'm home. It is a delightful walk. It is nice all year round.

I think if you had other commercial opportunities here in this residential neighborhood, that'd be great. I think it'd be great for people's quality of life. I think it would make more people want to live in the neighborhood. I think it'd just be good for everybody. I hope that answered your question.

You used the word compromise. The only thing that I would gently push back on is I actually think work from home is awesome, and I think coming to the office is also awesome. Fewer people are doing it now than ever, so office prices are cratering. I do think these are all equally good options. Work from home is a good option. Go to the office is a good option. Having neighborhood commercial co-work spaces is also a great option.

All right. Peter K., LC leader, asked the question: How should we think about using a land value tax as an alternative? How should we think about it? I think we should just think it's awesome.

If you listen to the podcast, I did a podcast with Lars Doucette a few weeks ago. I've gotten so much positive feedback. Lars is super cool. I will say one of the things that I like most about Lars is that he is normal.

In my lifetime, there's two groups of people that I really like but I have found difficult to commune with. Number one is the PRT advocates, personal rapid transit. I like them. I think their hearts are in the right place. I think they have a lot of good ideas, but they tend to bombard me with things that are a little bit crazy and things that I'm not going to spend my time and energy trying to convince other people to do. That's generally made them kind of angry and cranky with me. They think they have the answer. I think it is novel and would work in some places and is great, but I'm not going to carry water for them because I don't think what they send me is viable.

The other group is the land value tax people. I think that is even more viable and more important, and I've written about it in pretty much every book that I've written. I've talked about land value tax as being a positive thing. I said it's the best of all the bad taxes. No one likes property tax. No one likes sales tax. No one likes income tax. I get it. We probably wouldn't like the whiskey tax or whatever.

I think that the land value tax is the least distorting, most positively reinforcing local tax that we can have. I think from a local government standpoint, it's the one that most naturally aligns what is good for the local government and what is good for the residents in the community.

I think the property tax pits against each other, in a rivalrous way, what is good for the local government and what is good for the individual. I think the land value tax more closely correlates those. What you want is a tax system where they're correlated, where the things that would be good for me and for my neighbors are also good for the city. Because then when the city is working in their interest, they're also working in my interest. The property tax makes those in conflict. I would say the sales tax just completely blows that up altogether and makes the relationship almost completely rivalrous. It's all bad.
I've written a lot about both of that. I was talking about the PRT, and then I switched to land value tax. I have found land value tax people to be overly zealous. I have this joke that I always tell. If you listen to the podcast, you've heard me say it before. The land value tax people will tell you it's the best tax system there is, that it will not only create good land use and equitable taxation, but it will solve Middle East peace, it will cure cancer, it will fix the dilemma in the Taiwanese Straits.

They get a little bit zealous about this magic formula. I think Lars was really cool because he understood and projects its value, which is revolutionary, along with its place in our dialogue, which is not the most important thing. It is a great tool. Every state should enable it. If the state enables it, every city should move towards it and transition into it.

I think that a land value tax is exactly the kind of tax you need when you're trying to thicken up your neighborhoods, make better use of your places, and align what is good for your residents with what is good for the city so that they're naturally working on the same positive project.

All right. Tim B.: Are kids on electric dirt bikes going to kill the micromobility revolution?

I don't know if kids on dirt bikes will, but I do feel that newspaper reporters, and my wife's a newspaper reporter so I'm not going to go too much, and the busybodies in the neighborhood, the people who... I think that electric bikes are amazing. I think electric scooters are amazing. When I see people out riding them in my neighborhood, it makes me happy.

Now, I recognize they're going at unsafe speeds sometimes. I recognize that, especially when they get on the sidewalks, they can create a bit of mayhem. I realize that's not good. But I also recognize that everybody who's out doing that is not driving a car.

There was a news report I saw the other day. I think I put it in the Friday News Digest last week. By the way, for those of you that remember old, old, old Strong Towns, OG Strong Towns, I used to write this thing every Friday called the Friday News Digest. I loved doing it. It was so much fun. It eventually became one of the things I just couldn't do anymore.

With John Reuter starting as our executive director and my duties changing dramatically, I have had more time to do things like the Friday News Digest. So we decided to bring it back. It comes out by email only. If you want it, you've got to go to Strong Towns and sign up for email. Go sign up for email and you will get the Friday News Digest in your inbox every Friday.

I put in one of the recent Friday News Digests this newspaper article that said crashes, I think it was crashes, from these e-bikes are up 430 or something like that. It sounded awful. It sounded terrible. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. My comment that I added to it, because that's the whole thing about the Friday News Digest, I share articles but also a bit of commentary with each one, was that this sounds terrifying if you don't understand how percentages work. If you go from one to four, that's a 400% increase.

It's a silly thing to put a percentage on something that is such a marginal activity. That being said, the question is: Do I think they're going to kill the micromobility revolution? I don't. I don't think anything is going to kill it. I think it's a very natural thing that people are gravitating towards.

I do think that there will ultimately need to be a few rules put in place. But I feel this is like the early days of the internet, where more good is going to come from there being a little bit of messiness. Then we'll get a few years down the road and figure out what rules we need. I hope that's the direction that we go in.

All right. Honor B.: Who are your top three dream podcast guests, including those still with us and historical figures too?

Wow. I did not think about this one ahead of time, so I'm thinking about this on the fly. I got a chance to meet Nassim Taleb, who I've called the patron saint of Strong Towns thinking, even though he is alive and still with us. I enjoyed chatting with him. We had a really good time. I would love to have him on the podcast. I think that would be fantastic.

I loved talking to Tomas Sedlacek. He is my favorite economist, and I think he's just fascinating and interesting. Years ago when I had him on the podcast, it was great. I would love to have him on again.

Who else quickly comes to mind? If I had a historical figure that I would want to talk to, I feel like I'd want to talk to Thomas Jefferson. There's a guy named Clay Jenkinson who does a show called The Thomas Jefferson Hour. He doesn't do it anymore. He does some other show now. It's Voices of America or something. I can't remember what it's called.

He would do this show in three segments. It aired on public radio, but I got it on a podcast feed. The first two segments he would do in character as Thomas Jefferson. The last one he would do as Clay Jenkinson, and they would discuss things. I found those so fascinating because he is a humanities scholar. He studied Jefferson thoroughly.

Jefferson is such a complex person. He wrote the founding documents of our republic, these aspirational documents about human freedom, yet he himself had slaves. He denounced slavery, yet he had a slave mistress. Those are the surface dichotomies. The dichotomies in him run super, super, super deep. I would just love to be able to pick his brain and chat with him and learn from him.

I really think when Kennedy said there was a group of scholars gathered in the White House and Kennedy famously said, there's been no greater collection of intelligence or intellect here in the White House ever since Jefferson dined alone, I think that he was telling a joke, but it was a joke because the guy was brilliant. The guy was on a different level, and I think that would have been fascinating.

Historical figures, obviously I've read all about Leonardo da Vinci, who is equally incredible. I've traveled hours just to see a drawing that he did. I think I talked about this before, how I was at the Uffizi. You're going through the Uffizi Museum in Florence, and it's amazing painting after amazing painting after amazing painting. Then you come around the corner and there is a charcoal drawing, the beginnings of a painting. It's not even been painted yet. It's just: Here's the outline of what I was thinking.

It was like an NBA basketball player playing with high school kids. That was the difference. I looked at it and I was stunned. I was blown away. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Then I got closer and read: It's Leonardo da Vinci.

I'm not going to pretend I am the world's greatest connoisseur of art. I'm certainly not. But it is one of those things where, when you see genius and it expresses itself so clearly, you just kind of want to chat with it.

I would love to have chatted with John Lennon, really. I think it goes without saying it would obviously be fascinating to understand Jesus as a human, as a historical figure. But if you gave me the chance, I would love to meet the Apostle Paul, whose story, from a what-were-you-thinking standpoint, is maybe more approachable and more human. But now I'm getting way off track. So it's a little look into how I would think about things.

I listened to Peter Zion last week. There were a couple of podcast group discussions that he was part of. He wrote The End of the World Is Just the Beginning about the collapse of globalization. I bought that for our entire board, and I think it's a really important book. It was, I think, my number one book of the year a couple of years ago. I would love to chat with him.

He made a book recommendation, though. I don't know why I'm answering the question this way. In this panel discussion, they asked: What is the fiction book on geopolitics that you would recommend as the best book? He said World War Z, and there is no close second. He said there's nothing even close to it, and I found that really interesting.

I've been working on the next book in the Strong Towns series. I just finished it, and I said when I'm done with the book, I'm going to read something fiction. It's really hard to read when you're deep into writing because your mind loses focus. You're deep into it, and then you come out and you go into something else, and then it's hard to get back deep into it.

So I've spent the last month in a trance trying to finish this book. I said, when I'm done, I'm going to do a palate cleanser. I'm going to read some fiction, which I read maybe three or four fiction books a year. I started World War Z, and it's been very good. It's really weird. I read it before bed and it keeps me up, which I'm not sure is a good outcome. But anyway, I would put Peter Zion on my podcast list too.

All right. Ruben G., LC leader, and thank you, Ruben, for all of the work you've done helping edit the book. You had two questions. I'm going to read the second one because, as you said, you did ask the first one at the Gathering.

I believe you've described Strong Towns in terms of a paradigm shift. It's a really good question, and I think I'm probably going to struggle with it a little bit. John Reuter is here now as our executive director, and I'm going to say a couple of things about John's personality in relation to me because I find John's presence to be comforting, to be really healthy for me.

John and I intellectually talk every day about policy, about issues, about stuff. But I think what John does is he brings a positive optimism about things that I have in my best moments but don't have day to day. John will say, hey, look, we're winning. Look at this thing that happened. Look at this thing that happened. Look at this thing that happened. I think those are all true.

He'll point out, we have a Slack channel. I'm going to give you a little insight. Everybody thinks this is funny when they start, and it is funny. Our membership platform, when someone goes to Strong Towns and makes a donation to Strong Towns, they become a member. They go on our website, strongtowns.org/membership, click on membership, and go through that process.

One of the things you can do is leave us a comment. You can mark, share this comment, or, nah, this is just private, whatever. All of those comments show up in a Slack channel. The program that processes all of our donations is a program called Fundraise Up. That's the name of the program. So we named the channel FU Comments. FU Comments. It's FU-Comments.

Every time someone starts, they're like, what is this channel, FU Comments? It is literally the most loving, kind, affirming type of comments you can get. Of course, we get new members every day, so people are always writing very kind, generous things.

John loves this, and he will point them out to me. He'll be like, read this. Look at this. Here's what someone said. Isn't this wonderful? John has this positive way of reading that and talking about that and talking about what we do.

I tend to be the one who's like, yeah, but we're behind on this. Yeah, but we're not doing that. Yeah, we should have figured this out six months ago. I am the person who says this every year to my board in the annual report I put to them: I feel the sand slipping through the hourglass. That makes me impatient. It makes me push. It makes me want to go.

John has this thing about him where he's like, no, let's acknowledge how far we've come. Let's acknowledge what we've done. Let's acknowledge how powerful it is. Let's allow ourselves to sit with that a little bit and feel good about it.

I've enjoyed that and appreciated that from him because I think it gives me a good perspective. It gives me the right perspective on things. Now, quite frankly, pushing and keeping things moving is not my job anymore. John is doing that, and John's doing a fantastic job. So I don't worry about a lot of the things that I used to have on my plate.

The question, though, was about how far we are along in this paradigm shift. I will say, I think, a very Strong Towns answer, which is: A, I don't know. But B, we're a long ways along.

I can look back and see a time when we used to have to explain ourselves over and over again. Now we see people using what is clearly our words and our language to describe things without attributing it to us, without saying, according to Strong Towns, or, I got this from Strong Towns. They're just talking about it.

This is not some random blog. This is The New York Times. This is The Washington Post. This is Pew Research Center. This is the country of New Zealand. It is quite bizarre to see how our language and our way of describing things, and the story that we tell about cities, is just becoming culturally embedded. That was really the goal of having a media organization and approaching things the way that we approached it, to get to that point. It is really kind of crazy to see.

That being said, we still have a massive centralizing instinct. From a policy standpoint, we have a long ways to go. I think the key is going to be not having federal leaders have an awakening or state leaders have some kind of awakening about the value of local governments. I think it's going to be local governments stepping into the void that has been created by bad federal and state policy and broad dysfunction at those places, and starting to lead.
We're seeing more and more of that. I don't know when this podcast is going to come out, but I think it will come out either concurrently or after an article that I wrote about Post Falls, Idaho, a city where the mayor has put together something like an 18-page memo to the city council pointing out, hey, our budget balance today, we have a surplus today, but let's project this out and look where it goes. Here's why. Urban3 quotes, Urban3 quotes. Really, really, really good stuff. That's not even that unusual anymore.

I do think that the paradigm shift that we are looking for, the thing that we're looking to keep the momentum going, is more mayors, more city council members, more planning commission members, more Local Conversation leaders like you, Ruben, stepping into this void, answering the question, telling the story locally, and then helping cities step up and lead.

We need really healthy state government. We need really functional, healthy federal government. But I don't think we're going to get those by electing the right people or what have you. I think the way we're going to get that is by having really, really good local government filling the void of dysfunction today with positivity, with proactiveness, with really, really good results. I think what you're going to see from that is an upward mobility of thought leadership and positive action.

All right. I'm down to the last few minutes, and I've got three left. Warren, yours is really long. I'm out. Let me read this. How to address... Oh, this isn't... Oh, it is a question. Okay.

How to address the common misconception that more debt and more reliance on senior levels of government is a winning strategy, that the pyramid scheme is just good practice since future taxpayers will benefit from our spending, so should help pay for it?

Let me say it like this. I don't want to sound flippant here, but I feel this is the project. This is the thing that we are doing. This is why I started a blog in 2008. This is why in 2014, when our board came on and we created our strategic plan and we said we're going to do media, we're going to try to grow an audience, we're going to try to reach people with this message, that's why we did that.

When Local Conversations started to form and we created an update to our strategic plan that this is going to be part of what we do, that's why we have invested in that program and in raising people up who can locally tell this story and locally take these ideas. This is why we created the Finance Decoder. This is why we created the Crash Analysis Studio. This is why we created the housing toolkits and the Mission Accomplished white paper on transportation funding. This is why I have a list of things on my board that we're working on. These things are all designed to, in a sense, address the common misconception.

I think the more sophisticated we get at doing that, but also just the more persistent we are at it, the better. We have, okay, I am going to look here because I don't know the exact number, but we have something like 300. It's like 280 Local Conversations. I don't know the exact number, but it's somewhere in that range. I'm going to actually get it for you because I've got a dashboard that will tell me how many we have. Come on, come on, come on.

Oh, we have 263. So some of those ones that weren't meeting we have whittled down, which is good. I think there's an idea that we should have more, not less. The reality is that Local Conversations that aren't meeting are actually not helpful because they kind of keep other people from stepping forward. So we made a real concerted effort this year to not have Local Conversations that weren't actively doing stuff. We've whittled the list down. We're down to 263. That's from about 280. That's a really good number for us, 263 groups around the country.

We're giving them talking points, message, support. We're helping them step up. Some of them, like Sacramento, where we're going to be next year for our National Gathering, are doing astounding levels of work. Just amazing stuff.

So how do we address the common misperception? We just keep doing more of that. It's growing incrementally. Be patient. We're getting there. The thing about incremental is it compounds. We're in a compounding phase. Every metric we have shows compounding.

Could we do more? Yes. If someone came to us and said, hey, I would like to make a major donation to Strong Towns to help you do more, could we put that to work and accelerate this work? Absolutely, we could, and we would be happy to do that. We would be ecstatic and excited to do that. We have lots of strategies for doing that. Things are stable. They're moving in the right direction. Every metric we have is showing compounding impact, which is where we want to be.

Joya, I'm going to skip your question. Joya is one of my colleagues here at Strong Towns. She added her own question. It's going to be a long answer, so I will do that maybe next time.

I will end with Stevie H., the sidewalk detective. Stevie, thank you for this sweet question. Does Taco John's know it's the famous Strong Towns example? Yes.

Let me tell you a little bit about the Taco John's here in Brainerd. First of all, when it was built and when they went through and did all the stuff to build it, my second cousin, so my dad's cousin's daughter, ran the local economic development authority that pushed that through and made that the front of their annual brochure because it was such a successful project.

At the same time, one of my dad's other cousins, understand I live in a small town. I've told this story before. I met this girl one summer break. We were at a park here in town. We hung out. I kind of liked her. School started about two weeks later. I show up on the first day. Apparently she liked me enough to tell her mom about me because she came to school on the first day and said, hey, guess what? We're related.

Brainerd's 14,000 people. Baxter today is about 9,000. When I was a kid, it was maybe two or three. So this is a small town. I get it.

One of my dad's other cousins was the manager at Taco John's when I wrote that column. Did it make its way around Brainerd? Absolutely. I had council members say to me that they ran for council because of that article. One of them said, this is so brilliant. It changed my mind about everything, which is super cool. I'm deeply appreciative of the fact that people eventually grew to appreciate it.

At first, everybody here was just mad at me. It was like I had said the thing publicly you weren't supposed to say. This is the thing about small towns. They're beautiful. They're wonderful. I feel so grateful to live here because it's family.

A small town, the things that are beautiful about a small town are also the things that other people complain about. Part of it is a kind of social enforcement that you don't speak ill outside the family. I had, at the time, a tiny, tiny megaphone, but it was perceived as being much bigger than Brainerd, which it was. It was embarrassing to people, and people got mad at me, very, very angry with me, including awkward family get-togethers and things like that.

The funny thing is that over time people send me Taco John's stuff. Joe Minicozzi, who's a sweetheart, once bought a box of Taco John's gear, the stuff that they actually wear in the store, collared shirts that say Taco John's on it. I got a Taco John's glass and a mug.

What has been really kind of cute is that people stop in Brainerd. They're driving through Brainerd, and they stop and take a picture and then send it to me. Or they're somewhere, they're in Wisconsin or Montana or whatever, and they encounter Taco John's and they pull in and take a selfie with Taco John's in the background, and then they send it to me.

I think it's beautiful. I think it's really sweet. I know it is a connection. It's an endearment kind of thing. I think it's beautiful. I think it's very delightful. I'm grateful whenever people do it because I know it has affected them and impacted them in a way where they can't unsee it. It's not that they probably didn't see it before or weren't open to it, but now Taco John's has become emblematic of something. I think that's good. That's a story that has legs.

So, yeah, does Taco John's know it's a famous Strong Towns example? Most definitely. I don't know if the corporate headquarters does. I don't know, but I know the local one certainly did when this thing came out, and lots of people keep that alive.

Hey everybody, we've gone a little long. Thank you. I will do this again in a few weeks. It'd be nice to do this once a month or so, or maybe more often. I don't know. We'll see. But I will for sure post in the Commons again: Hey, you've got questions, let's have them. We'll make this a regular thing we do.

If you are a Strong Towns member, go to commons.strongtowns.org. You are in, get in. There's lots of cool stuff going on there. You're going to want to be involved in the conversation. If you are not a member of Strong Towns, literally go sign up.

When you sign up to be a member of Strong Towns, you are expressing your support for this movement. You're saying, I value these ideas. I value your approach. I value the Local Conversations and the work that they're doing. I value the toolkits and the stuff you're putting together. This is all really valuable. I value it. Here is my financial contribution to helping you do this.

Let me give you a little insight. The financial contribution to become a member of Strong Towns is whatever you can afford, whatever is a reasonable amount for you. Do we have members that give us hundreds of dollars a month? Yes. Do we have members that give us tens of thousands of dollars? We have a handful of them that do. I'm very grateful. Do we have members that give us a dollar a year? Yeah, we've got plenty of those. Do we separate them in some way? No.

You're all members. You've all stepped forward and said, what you're doing is really important and I want to be part of it. If you do that, come and join us in the Commons because that's where members meet. That's where members chat. That's where these questions came from.

By the way, when I finish up here, I'm doing this for the podcast. This is going to go on the podcast, but I'm also recording this on video, and the video is going to go immediately into the Commons for everybody to get. You're listening to this probably a week and a half later, so you could have had all this cool stuff a while ago.

Anyway, thanks everybody. This has been a lot of fun. I haven't done a late-night thing like this in a while, and it's cool to come back and do it again. Take care. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. See you next time.

This episode was produced by Strongtowns, 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 today

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