Shaun Newman Podcast - #747 - Tom Luongo & Jim Kunstler

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

We discuss the recent news of Biden authorising missiles to strike inside Russian, 15 minute cities, suburban caves, and wrestling with building community. Jim is an American author, social critic, public speaker and blogger. He is best known for his books The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere. Tom is an amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, former research chemist and publisher of the Gold, Goats n' Guns podcast and newsletter. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

This is Ben Davidson. This is late and great. This is Tanner Nadey. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Prodnick. This is Alex Krenner. This is Jim Sinclair. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast.

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It's heading to Calgary, Winsport, May 10th. It's going to be at the Winsport, May 10th. And we've been adding some speakers as we go along. So you've got Tom Luongo, Alex Kramer, Truck Prodnick. They were at the first one. And now we've added in Kaelin Ford, and just this week, Matt Erritt. And we got guest hosts that are going to include Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. She was there last year.

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Who's coming to the dueling pianos here In a couple weeks' time I think those are going to be a lot of fun And back-to-back shows sold out So that's really cool I'm excited for those And I'd just like to say If you're listening or watching on Spotify,

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somebody it's okay i like hearing from all you find folks and um love it if you'd leave me a review subscribe all that good stuff okay let's get on to the tale of the tape The first is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He's best known for his books The Long Emergency and the Geography of Nowhere. The second, an amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, former research chemist, and publisher of the Gold, Goats, and Guns podcast and newsletter. I'm talking about James Howard Cuncelor and Tom Luongo. So buckle up, here we go.

Welcome to this Coddenuma podcast. Damn joined by Tom Lawongo, Jim Cuncelor. So, sir, sirs, how's it go? Great. I mean, you know, for, you know, prescivists of World War III or something, not too bad. I'm kidding, of course. I literally had on here.

I know exactly what I want to talk about, but I don't know how not to talk about the fact that, like, are we going to start bombing Russia? Can we just start there? Is that what's coming in the news? Or am I just, are they just trying to fill me with fear and dread? I don't think so.

I put up a long post on Twitter this morning going through this, and I asked this very simple question of, did Biden actually say this, or did the New York Times report that an aide who was near Biden, you know, mentioned in a meeting behind the outhouse somewhere that Biden had, you know what I mean? Like, this feels like a sireat that Biden, after everything that's happened with the election and everything else, that he would sabotage. the incoming administration this way, because when you go down the rabbit hole of what it actually

means and what it actually could imply, it implies that Biden is giving the Ukrainians and the U.S. military the green light to start World War III and before Trump takes office. Now, let's think about what that means. I saw that last night, and I was like, I'm like, okay, it doesn't really track with what I've seen to Biden for the last couple of weeks. And then my wife walks into the kitchen this morning while I'm sipping my copy and she says, and they're now talking about 25th Amendment stuff about Biden. Like, oh, okay, now it all makes sense. Ready?

Joe's crazy. Just gave the Ukrainians the, this is the narrative. This is not the reality. This is the narrative. Joe's crazy. and he just gave the Ukrainians the green light to cross Russia's red line before the Trump administration takes place so that we need the 25th Amendment him out because he's crazy and hand over the reins to Queen Kamala. And then if World War III and the Russians go outside and actually start,

then we can declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, blah, blah, blah, blah, and execute the coup necessary to keep Trump coming back to power. Now, I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen. I'm saying that's what their playbook looks like. And that it's insane. It's reckless. It's silly. But the incentives line up with all of the people who are now threatened, knowing full well that what Trump has put on the table in the kind of move, counter move scenario. But he's put on the table with this cabinet and everything else.

That's what we are. That would be the next move in their playbook because they don't really, they're running out of moves. This is a kind of, this game has reduced, I think, to a couple of sides. It's no longer the big mess that it always is. And this is just one aspect of that kind of reduction. And I hate to be this reductionist about it. But this is what I think is going on. I can't tell a better story than that.

But I do see a different outcome or a different play out of the, of the moves. And we have to consider the fact that Vladimir Putin has shown tremendous prudence and patience over the last four years, and that it would probably be out of character for him to discontinue doing that, especially when the prospect for getting a new negotiating partner

is right around the corner for him. So even if we do do something as stupid as reckless, and reckless as allow our targeting technology to be used to harm Russians in Russian territory and Russian cities deep into Russia, as has been implied. I think the worst thing that will happen is that Mr. Putin would turn certain districts of Kiev into an ashtray, probably the ones with the government offices in them. My theory all along has been he's refrained from doing that for four years for the simple reason that he doesn't want to have a basket case failed state on his doorstep. He'd rather have some kind of entity that is sufficiently well organized to not become a nexus of some sort of terrorist mischief, which is what failed states do.

So, you know, there are probably any number of other targets in Ukraine than the ones that I just mentioned that he could hit in the event that we hit him. And I think that that's pretty much how it would play out. And he would, in essence, refrain from striking some NATO country or one of the NATO capitals or any of the things that people fantasize about him doing. and that would prevent NATO really from responding and from us, you know, taking it up to the World War III level. Well, I'm right in thinking, gents, that Trump is texting him right now or whatever, phone calling Putin. Would I be right in thinking that?

Like he's not going to sit here and be like, hey. No, I think they have intermediaries. They have intermediaries. Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be intermediaries. Yeah, it has to be because otherwise then it's a Logan Act crap, like they did what they pulled with Mike. Flynn um you guys they're still looking for anything imaginable to hang trump with before the um before in

inauguration before he's actually officially president for this is what they're forgive me tom that you what act what what what is that logan act which is what they did which is what they used against mike flyn it wasn't ever been used then they used against mike flyn to stop him from becoming a 200 year old law that has never been used right and it's a law that that you know private citizens are not allowed to negotiate with foreign governments. Yeah, like that never, like that never happens in the United States and like it never happens that. We never sent April Halerman over on a mission, you know, right?

Right. Or anybody. Well, I always, I always boil this down to sports, right? You got a signing, you know, the, the deadline for signing free agents is coming up. Nobody's talking to the free agents. They're not talking. They're going through different people to make sure that, I, I get what you're saying.

But the people who would be talking here, Sean, this is something I think we, I brought up with Alex Craneer on a podcast about a month ago. And Jim and I, we might have talked about it the last time we were on with Tommy Carrigan and Dave Collum, which is that the militaries are talking. Like, if the one thing that I can almost guarantee at this point is that the deconfliction hotline between the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Pentagon is it's an open circuit at this point. Like it's an open phone call. It's been open for 24 hours. And they're just chatting. Like maybe they're putting each other on mute every once in a while, but the phone call is open. Because this is how you're going to get around this kind of rotten nonsense.

This feels like a classic sciop operation in order to back Joe Biden into a corner to take responsibility for something he didn't do while Blinken or Sullivan and or, end or, and or. and MI6 and all the usual suspects attempt to gin up a war that no one wants because that's what they need and that's where we are and that's what it felt like but to go through the steps mechanically of how they can literally stop Trump from taking power and I'm again thin okay I'm not arguing that this is you know but this this is like probable I'm saying is that this is that this this is the way they're thinking is because they have all of this drawn up on a whiteboard over at Evil Corp Central and they've been running this, you know, this thing forever in a freaking day and they're not going to stop until they run the clock out.

Like this is a series of ever worsening moves. I was chatting with my partner Dexter Wright this morning about this. I said, this reminds me, this situation reminds me of the months that we dealt with during the when when the Biden administration was refusing to reconfirm Jerome Powell for second term at the Fed. We had the insider trading scandal break in October November. Everybody was asking the question, why hasn't Powell been reconfirmed, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then there was all of this stuff. And then Biden wouldn't talk to him.

And, you know, we kept putting off the meeting and then they have a meeting and then nothing would happen. And Biden wouldn't do it and blah, blah. And all of this kept happening. And it was all these political move, counter moves to try and make the argument that Jerome Powell should not be given a second term as Fed chairman. His term ends, right, officially, just like Zelensky's term ended officially over the summer. And he had to declare martial law in order to continue the existing government. I use those. I put my scare quotes on. And then once that happened, that freed the FOMC to vote Powell, sorry, Powell chair until reconfirmation

hearing. And once that was done, that was the last move. And at that point, two days later, Biden, you know, blesses the Senate confirmation hearing. Powell wins 80-20 and he's reconfirmed his Fed chair. That's in late February. At the next March, at the March meeting, he starts raising interest rates. And then we have the next two years. And it's kind of, I mean, it's all happened at like the same time. You know, Powell's confirmation hearing, the start of the Russian Ukraine war and all of that stuff,

all in that same six-week period. Okay. So I think this is what we're, we're going to watch the transition is going to play like this, move counter, move back and forth in order to try and stop Trump from being inaugurated, whatever they have to do, there's going to be legal challenges. Jamie Raskin is going to try and invoke the 14th Amendment. Like they're all, they're going to do everything. And they're going to throw the kitchen sink at it until, you know, Trump walks in and then they all get freaking perp walked.

That's what I think is going to happen. I must say, I think that if it got. to the point of the kind of coup that you're describing, you know, under martial law and really attempting to prevent a transition, I think you'd see a counter coup in a New York minute. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I think that a very large number of officers in the Pentagon or outside of the Pentagon, too, below the, you know, the executive general level will side with Mr. Trump and put an end to that nonsense very quickly.

Well, that's what I think has been, that's also part of the move, counter move, Jen. Sure. Right. But it's the ultimate counter move. Of course it is. The military just finally steps in and goes, no, no. It really kind of depends how insane these people continue to be. You know, there's all kinds of interesting chatter out there.

there's an attempt to pretend to re-examine Democratic Party principles and their relations with the blob and their behavior, but it's mostly pretend. And for the most part, they're either being quiet or they're working in the background like Mark Elias to screw up what's left of the mopping up operations in the elections over in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and California. But besides that, they continue to operate basically. I think it's important for listeners to understand what their basic principle is. It's called bad faith. It means that everything they do is dishonest.

Yes. And until they demonstrate that they're capable of dealing in good faith, which is going to take a lot of demonstrating, we shouldn't accept anything they say as being above board. I agree completely. It's that whole distrust, but verify. Assume they're lying. Assume they're acting in bad faith. Let them prove it to you that they're not. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree to him. That's a very important point. Um, you know, when I first reached out to Jim, my, my, my, I mean, like, I, I, I follow the news cycle and I'm like, oh, my cat, we're going to, we're going to start here. But one of the reasons I wanted to bring Jim on is, uh, and then, uh, of course, I reached out to Tom, because you were, Tom, you're, Tom, you're the podcast I listened to, that talked about some of what I wanted to talk about was, you know, 15 minute cities has been, um, I don't know. it's tied to the weft right the the the the the line 15 minute cities goes back to the weft everything that comes from the left is evil and so people have just been like revolting against anything to do with anything urban planning anything if it's tied to there and link it there and i thought why not bring you guys on to chat about this i listened to tom's podcast

and i enjoyed it and i was like but now i want to sit and listen and poke and prod and just get some different thoughts out. 15-minute cities. Well, yeah, I'll start here. Jim's been doing the work on this for decades, honestly, and we've had conversations about this. So, yeah, go ahead, Jim. Okay. There's a great deal of confusion about this, and I have to preface what I have to say with this. For 30 years, since the 1990s, when I wrote a book about the suburban development problem in America, the fact that we had smeared all this stuff over the landscape and created a human habitat that was very unsatisfying in many ways, you know, spiritually,

psychologically, economically, financially, in terms of personal relations, the sense of community, anything that you can imagine, the suburban project has had very deleterious effects on American life. And so I wrote a book called The Geography of Nowhere about it. And it was a popular book. It became kind of a cult classic in the architecture schools, which also teach urban design, of course. And I wrote a sequel to that called Home from Nowhere

because I had become associated with a reform group called the New Urbanist Organization. And the new urbanists were a crowd of, architects and municipal officials and developers, people who develop property, and, you know, a very wide array of people who are responsible for creating how we inhabit the terrain of the planet, and especially our corner of it here in North America. And they had a wonderful program for reforming suburbia by reintroducing the principles. of traditional town planning so that we could have walkable communities

so that we wouldn't be tyrannized by the automobile but could still accommodate it, but accommodated with some discipline so that it wasn't destroying our lives. And they designed a lot of wonderful projects in the last 30 years as kind of demonstrations of how to do this. You know, the prototype was called Seaside in Walton County, Florida, and on the panhandle.

And Seaside was just a marvelous 80-acre new town that they built from scratch, according to very rigorous principles that produced a great outcome. I don't know if you've ever been to it, Tom. Have you ever been out there? No, I haven't you. Well, it's worth a trip.

Although, you know, there's been a lot of wannabe like it development west of Panama City. It's still worth seeing. Anyway, they also, the new urbanists also did a lot of work in the towns and cities around America who hired the people who practiced this art and technique to recode their municipal laws, to make, to create a situation so that a car-dependent suburban outcome was not mandatory, which has been the case all over America for the last three generations. And they did a wonderful job, and part of the result of that was that a lot of cities were able to fix their centers

and build buildings larger than one story and create a real sense of place and also pay attention to bring some artistry. to the design of the city because we live in a country which unfortunately has completely disposed of the idea that there should be any artistry in your surroundings. And that's a terrible, terrible thing to have done that. So the new urbanist did all this work. Now, in the 2020s, all of a sudden, the World Economic Forum comes along with this proposal called the 15-minute city. And it has totally confused the population, the public, about the value of a walkable community. Because the 15-minute city is really a recipe for surveillance, tyranny, and crowd control of people.

And it has nothing to do with the principles of good urban design that would produce a place that would be worthy of your affection, that would be worth living in, that would be worth walking from point A to point B in. Because most American places are not. You're not going to walk down the six-leiner between Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas, and feel comfortable in that environment. But, you know, if you're in downtown Savannah or Charleston, which still remain wonderful examples of traditional town design, you're going to feel great in these settings and in places like that. So the 15-minute city has really, shall we say, queered that whole idea that there's some value in traditional town design. And another element of this, unfortunately, is that I think the MAGA movement has a tremendous psychological investment in suburbia for its own sake. Because let's face it, that's where so much of our national wealth has been invested, including the wealth of every household that lives there. And people move there for reasons that were not altogether bad reasons, you know, our cities have become places that are very unpleasant to live in, for the most part, in many

cities in America. So, you know, it made sense for them to do it. So in short, they're comfortable there in that milieu. And they had become, you know, adamant advocates of it. The larger problem is that it's a living arrangement with a poor future. The requirements for running it are cheap petroleum, cheap electricity, and endless resources that we're not going to exactly have in the same way that we've been imagining. Let me say one more thing about this. There are strange and interesting ways that this is failing that we're not paying attention to. And I think I've mentioned this before on one of the three Amigos shows that we did.

Sure. But, you know, the mass motoring, the happy motoring paradigm is not failing on the basis of fuel right now. It's not failing because we don't have any gasoline and we can't make electric cars or any of those things. It's failing because the middle class has been so crushed that there are not enough people who qualify for loans to buy cars in the way that Americans are used to buying cars on installment. So it's failing at the financial end now, and the car makers cannot innovate enough new ways to make loans that are preposterous loans, like eight-year loans on a used car. They can't innovate enough new ways to make loans to get enough business to keep their sales volumes up. So the whole mandatory motoring thing is failing on the financial end now, not on the fuel. And that's probably coming as a big surprise to a lot of people, but that's how it's playing out. And we're, anyway, I'll leave it at that for now. I've got a couple of things to say about these things because this is,

because this is tied to why we wound up with sprawling suburbs, why we wound up with all of these things. We can go all the way back to, I remember reading a trench and analysis of, of, you know, why Walmart, why Walmart was the perfect, business model in a post-Eisenhower interstate system America that created, you know, created urban sprawl. Moreover, the movement in the 1960s and 70, I remember talking to my

former massage therapist about this was an old, you know, liberal from the 60s in Gainesville, Florida. So we're talking about that style liberal saying, you know, we wanted to do away with mixed use housing. We went to single-use zoning. We went to, we went to exorbitantly, ruinous tax policy that made it more advantageous to sit to to develop virgin land than to redevelop existing urbanized land and that's part of the reason why we wound up with urban sprawl. Moreover with the interstates which we which we did for logistical purposes in case of an invasion that's what the the Eisenhower interstate highway system was designed for it really partly partly not entirely it was a development scheme as well yeah it was a development scheme as well

But what did it do? Like we put all these things, you know, it's like I look today, right? When I first moved to Gainesville as an undergraduate, I was 18, I-75 was the frontier. I mean, literally there were cows along I-75 at exits 384 and 387, which are the two main roads, Newbury and Archer Road, coming out of Gainesville. Today, it's one, it's now jumped I-75.

Now, the county commission and the city commission, that desperately tried to hold that development back for a long, long time. Eventually, the moratoriums and the deals all ended. I mean, I can go into an hour on just the city of Gainesville. But the intentions of the admittedly, like, toxically left-wing government that we have in Elachua County, as an example, their intentions were fine. I spoke to all these county commissioners when I used to run a libertarian party 20 years ago. We spoke about all these things. We talked about all these things. we saw them instituting certain land use policies and zoning and whatnot. What did they wind up doing?

They wound up going back to McSews zoning. Downtown Gainesville today, they're trying to restrict traffic flow. They're trying to make a car. What did they do that? It's opposed to really bring great design to the city. What they did was they restricted traffic by getting rid of lanes and getting rid of this and getting rid of that and making it expensive in terms of taxation and blah, blah, blah, blah. What they've been in the hyperfinancialization of the economy over the last 15 years with this advent of zero bound money after Lehman Brothers, downtown Gainesville today, which we had like the worst student ghetto in the country for every of any major university. I know, I live there. Okay. But it was- Columbus, Ohio is pretty bad too. I go, Columbus, Ohio, it was pretty bad. I remember going there

in, you know, 10, 20, my wife's family was from Ohio. So I've been there a few times. Athens, Ohio had a was much, was much better over the University of, of Ohio, not Ohio State. Columbus is Ohio State, Athens is Ohio University. But, you know, it was still charming. It was still right next door to the campus, and we had all these great little shops and private businesses, and they're all gone. And it's now like Wall Street Central. I tell people, I mean, I've lived north of Gainesville now for over 20 years. I worked away from home for five.

I rarely go into Gainesville and go certainly go downtown to the northwest corner of where basically what amounts to university in 13th, which is like the center of of Gainesville. It's the northeast corner of the University of Florida. And then it sprawls out from there. And that's the main part of campus. Like I hadn't driven there in like five or six years. And then the first time I took 13th Street to go to campus, then ages, I usually come in from the west. I was like, this place looks like West Palm. Like they built all of these, you know, apartments over shops and all of this stuff.

It's all, it's all brutalist in its architecture. It's all, it's all ugly, right? At least the old charm of these old, you know, houses in Gainesville that were built in the 30s with cloth wiring and whatnot. At least they were cool houses, like, and it's all gone. And it's now been replaced with almost what almost looks like, you know, it's a kind of fake, you know, artificial version of it. This is also something that the public, unfortunately, is confused about and by and some of the developers, because there are some basic principles that are very important, like how the building meets the ground. Because all the action in your town is going to be on the ground and the sidewalk. And you have to provide something that's satisfying and psychologically nourishing and commercially useful.

for people on the ground, whether it's a shop or a hardware store or a bar or a cafe or something. And that's what activates the streets of your town. Part of the problem is that it has not been important for the developers to do architecture, that is the treatment of the buildings themselves that is up to the level of the urbanism, because there are two different things. The urban design is one thing. That is how the building relates to the street and to the other buildings around it. And architecture, which is how the building is programmed on the inside and what it presents to the world on its exterior. So these are two different issues. And the architecture has really lagged the urban design. So in many places and in many cases, like the town that I is 15 miles east of here, Saratoga Springs, where I lived for 30 years. It's also a college town.

We had a very robust rebuilding of the center of town with a lot of six-story apartment buildings over the last 20 years. And the urban design is great. It's really livened up the town. But the quality of the architecture on the outside of the buildings is real me. You know, it's real cartoon architecture.

There's no, you know, the architects still have this allergy to decent ornamentation, and they don't even know how to do it. They don't know how to proportion the buildings. You know, they don't know how to design ornament that signifies the tectonics of the building or they're unable to typologically inform people what the building is. it's still, you know, they don't know whether it's an insecticide factory or a school or, you know, a spa or, thank you. You know, you can't tell. So that's been a problem. But on the whole, the country has been struggling with this whole issue about how to make our everyday environment better. It's been struggling with this for about 40 years now, ever since the recognition in the early 80s that we couldn't continue just, continuing to sprawl out all over the country. Unfortunately, the habits and customs of the building industry itself have been as much of an impediment to improving our surroundings

as the officialdom that regulates it, which is also fraught with inertia and cannot reform itself. So what you're going to see is really this paradigm has to just play out until it's a bitter, unfortunate end. And the good news is that much of the suburban stuff that's out there was built so poorly in the first place that it's just not going to last very long. You know, the houses that are made of strandboard and vinyl, you know, they have a very short horizon of usefulness.

The one-story strip malls and that kind of crap, all the muffler shops and fast food joints, You know, they're basically going to be salvage yards for aluminum and eyebeams, steel eye beams, and even copper and even probably concrete blocks because concrete blocks take an enormous amount of energy to make. And I think that, you know, salvage is actually going to be one of the great industries of the future. But we've been we've been wrestling with this for 40 years. We made some progress during the 90s and early 2000s, and now we're kind of hitting a wall with it. And I'm fearful that the MAGA movement is not going to be interested in improving the surroundings of our lives

and therefore not able to rebuild communities because suburbia is an anti-community. environment. It's a bad human ecology. Well, I'll say this. Tucker Carlson just, I don't know if you saw the clip that he was going after he went Chris Cuomo, he and Chris Cuomo got into it. And Carlson made a very, very passionate, impassioned plea for proper, for building, for restoring or returning us to good, healthy architecture. And he, he's, He made a big point of this. He's been interested in this for a long time. He had me on his Fox Nation thing.

I did an hour interview with him two, three years ago. And he also had on my friend, Andres Duany, who was really the founding, you know, inspiration for the new urbanist movement. He's the guy who really, you know, made it come together. Well, here's the thing, Jim. And this is the interesting part of that. One last thing, Sean,

and we'll come back into this, which is that so much of this is downstream. I keep wanting, I keep having to make this point because it's so hard to see for people to get, but from my side of the fence, from where a corrupt money begets a corrupt society, you have to fix the money to fix the people's incentives to start fixing their communities and this and everything. People want what you're talking about, Jim. They just don't know how to get there because they don't have the capital and they don't, and they have too many roadbox put up in front of them in order to get there.

You know, it's amazed me for decades that you get, you know, relatively well-off people from Minneapolis and Cincinnati and Omaha who go to Europe on vacation. And they have a fabulous time in these European cities and towns. And then they go back and they pass every conceivably stupid law they can to ruin their cities. If I may. Sure. Because I'm staring at two guys who feel like have stared at this problem when I listen to you talk for quite some time. The community thing I find very interesting.

Jim, you said, and I think I got this right, suburbia is anti-community, correct? Yeah. That's what you said? So building out the urban sprawl is anti-community. That's what my, so like the suburbs is not good for community. That's what I hear. Am I right in that? Yeah, essentially it is. It's very bad.

Okay. So then my question is, so how would you design a city so that you foster community? It's not that difficult. Let me give you an example of one way that it really fails very, very badly. Children need to develop a sense of autonomy in order as they get older, in order to manage their lives. lives in the world. And they learn it by increments. They learn wayfinding when they're six, seven, eight years old. They learn how to go to a place and get home on their own. Sure. And when you create an environment where a kid cannot get to anything without the family chauffeur, mom, you're depriving children of a way of developing, how to navigate themselves through the world,

how to learn how to use the environment around them. And that is very, very damaging to development. I think it's one of the reasons that we now see such incredible incompetence and stupidity in the younger generations, you know, and helplessness. No, no, this is an interesting point. Like if you look at your typical burb clave, which is a term I got from Neil Stevenson ages ago and snow crash, like you look at your typical burb clay that was designed to around a, in a kind of defensive model, right? You have a few ways in and out, maybe only one where the kids can where everybody thought it was a good idea to put all the, and this is the parents. the parents did this and this worry that the world was becoming less and less safe.

And so we are going to create a, we're going to create a community, a false community behind very few points of access. And the kids grow up in a very sheltered environment. They don't learn how to interact with the world that's a little dangerous. It's all way a little too safe. And it makes sense that in the post-World War II era that we would have that when the world was really unsafe. Okay. And then we added on.

And so we wound up with that model. And that's part of the reason why people did this. And we have to deal with that from a certain perspective that people were psychologically broken in some way. And they wanted and the cities were falling apart because the money was because now the debt was piling up. Now the capital was the seed corn of the previous generations had been consumed in war and regulation and this and that and everything else. And so makes perfect sense. Look, I'm a child of this, right?

My family traces it before I came over the boat. My family, my father's family's from Brooklyn. My mom's family's from Queens. You've got the money you use in the Capulets because they're Queens and Brooklyn Italians don't get along. Okay. And then eventually they have four kids in basically suburbia, Long Island, near to Queens. like Roosevelt in that area.

And eventually, you know, by 1968, my dad's like, no, we're moving out of the city because this place is dangerous. I'm born in February. They move into the house that they had built in Highland Mills, 45 to 50 miles to the north. And he then sacrificed two and a half to three hours of his life every day to commute back and forth to his job. Do you know, Orange County. We went one step further.

So, yeah, like we were in Orange County. Okay. And so just, you know, Highland Mills is next to Harriman, that area, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Right over the mountain on Rootix, okay? So, um, so I went to Montere Woodbury High School and you can look that up. It's not like, I'm not given on anything for free. So understand, but those were two little old towns by Highland Mills and Central

Valley, which is known as Woodbury, you know, a couple thousand people. And the whole place by the time the 1970s was over. I grew up in a little town, a little, you know, effectively a little birdclay, one road in and out, carved out of the side of a mountain, all Irish and Italian cops and firemen. And everybody did the same thing every day. They all got, they all got in their cars at 7.30 or 6 o'clock in the morning and went into town, went up Route 6, went into traffic circle, 9W or the Palisades down to New York City, whether they were going to Brooklyn or, you know, the Bronx. Let me recount some of my childhood experience, which is that my parents moved out to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 when I was six years old.

And, you know, the things that children need between the ages of, let's say, five and eight, when they're too old to be in the nursery and too young to be, they're too old to be in the nursery and not old enough to, really be let loose on their own. You know, all they needed is a place to ride their bikes and, you know, play flies up and and do those things that young kids do. And for me, it was splendid. I enjoyed those three years in the suburbs, and I was very unhappy when my parents split up, and I moved back to Manhattan with my mom, who eventually remarried to a very

nice man, and I had a very good stepfather. But we lived in Manhattan. Anyway, I used to go back out to Manhattan to visit my friends as I got older and older. And when I was living in New York as a nine-year-old kid, I did all kinds of things on my own. I was at large in the city. I was not supervised. I took taxi cabs on my own. I went into Chinese restaurants and ordered lunch on my own when I was nine years old.

I went, I, you know, took myself to the museums. I used to get on Yankee, go up to Yankee Stadium by myself when I was 10 years old without being supervised. I learned how to manage my environment. That's a difference. And my friends in the suburbs didn't learn how to do any of that stuff. And as they moved into their teens, they exhibited a certain kind of what I would think of is really kind of uniformed depression. you know and that was when they started to spend all their time in the basement listening to rock and roll and smoking pot you know because there was nothing for them in that environment around them and no place to go and nothing for them to do and so that's what they did and children and teenagers need older children and teenagers certainly need much more than a place to play stickball and ride their bikes and you don't get that the suburbs and it's very, very damaging.

And I'll say that we did a lot of that. We played baseball in the streets. We went around after the 4th of July and we found up all that we found all the unfired firecrackers and made big piles of gunpowder and blew up our matchbox cars and all sorts of stuff. But I can tell you that I did a lot of wandering. We did personally. I did a lot of wandering as a kid.

He was one of my best friend that I grew up with lived just outside of my burplight, right? So at the end of that road, which intersected with the road that took us to town, he lived on that road. And I would just like climb up the mountain along the mountain and into his backyard. Talk about wayfinding. I knew how to navigate the woods around my and around my area. Yeah, but that's kind of a gorilla childhood because I'll tell you something that's missing. You know, you can do all those things and you can kind of.

out around and find your way in the back ways around, you know, that kind of environment. But you're not going to have interactions, like with the guy who runs a newsstand and the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker is what you get in a town that functions well. And by the way, the model for a good, the models, plural, for good towns that are well-designed are all over America. The trouble is that they're all in a state of complete deactivation and disinventive. investment and, and, you know, abandonment. So, you know, we, you don't have to go that far to find a good model. No, it's really funny. Actually, the small town that I live just outside of, I'm not going to tell you what town I live in.

Is that way when you look at, when you just drive around it, you're like, everything we need really would should need is like within three blocks of the one light, the one light in, you know, the main street light, the traffic light in the town. But unfortunately, all those small businesses can't make it. They're there is a sincere level of disrepair. But part of that was because the entirety of the county outside of the city of Gainesville was in disrepair. And the same thing, if you look, if you go into all the towns that dot around Gainesville, I don't care if it's high springs or Latchewberry or Archer or what or any of them, all of them, Keystone Heights, all of them. You can see the same pattern.

Part of it is the ruinous county taxation. Okay, that's the first part. And the second is that all of the people in the external part of the county are being taxed to hell and gone. And all that money is staying in the city of Gainesville. It's not being given back to them. And then there's the state taxation. Then there's the federal taxation and everything else. And it's just awful.

And then what you wind up with is the way I am, which is I don't even live. in a lot of county i refuse because the taxes are half of what they are in a lateral county so i we moved outside of a lot of county doing exactly what my dad did and i worked in gainsville at the time and we you know moved 25 miles north of gainsville to commute back and forth because i'm not paying four thousand dollars a year for you know you know for in taxes for on a hundred and twenty thousand dollar house tom what's what size what size the city do you grow up in Just the size. I grew up in a small town that was literally the two towns.

If you squished the two towns together, we're less than 3,000 people. But you talked about Brooklyn right at the start, correct? My family's from there. So my father's family is from Brooklyn. What size of town did you grow up in? It's called Manhattan. Population of that, I don't know, two, three million. Correct.

I just, I'm sitting here and I'm listening to this, and I'm going, okay. I'm like I come from the smallest of small towns Hamlet right grew up on a farm now I live in a city that's 30,000 right and then you know you go down the road and Tom's been here multiple times and you can get to a city that's a million and you know like Canada is just different than Manhattan right like you got to go to Toronto or Vancouver to get anything similar and let me tell you where I sit that is a long way away so like when I hear you know the way to get community back in a city is how you build it I'm like Well, I find that interesting. But where I sit, my community has been lost because people don't talk to each other anymore. Yeah, but they don't talk to each other because you don't get a complex matrix of relationships between people who, you know, who make things, produce things, and people who offer services and employ their neighbors and. In the same city. And have two roles in their community. they have an economic role and they have a social role and you don't get that anymore.

And it's certainly not going to get that with both parents working with the women cannot be homemakers and community organizers. Because the best community organizers are the moms. Like that's, it's incredibly important. You still see vestiges of that. I mean, Sean, I've been to where you, I've been to where you do this out in Lloyd Minster. And I, you know, what's the first thing I said to you when we got there? I'm like, I drove, I flew all day, 16 hours to go to Edmonton and then get in a car, drive three hours to go to Frickon, which is 20 miles up the road.

Like literally Lloyd Minster reminds me of Lake City, Florida, but with a casino. Small casino, mind you, but a small, but I'm like, huh, the only difference is it's Canadian tire as opposed to discount tire. It's, you know, the Walmart's the same. You know, and like it's all the Canadian versions of the same stores that we have, but it's the same field. There's one road that goes through the middle of it. There's so much space that you can build out and you don't have to build up. But in places like that where it's wide and flat, it actually makes a kind of sense. And by the way, and the hard part, and I keep coming back to this, being economic,

there's an economic disincentive for people to come together, even under those circumstances. You can see people trying desperately to try and keep the best of those things alive. no matter where you are, right? But it's been very, very difficult to do as everybody's being pulled economically in whatever direction they have to be in order to survive because the jobs aren't there. The jobs are somewhere else because, you know, because, because, because, because, because. And, you know, when you raise the marginal tax rate of what it means to support some far-flung, I mean, I hate to call Canada an empire, but relative to the Canada, Ottawa and Toronto are an

empire compared to Lloyd Minster. And when you shift the focus, you see the, you see the same dynamics, which is all the capital went to the center. All the money goes there and there's nothing and all the wealth is produced out there is produced in the hinterlands and then flows into the capital. And we have the same problem in the United States. You change that dynamic. Okay. You change the incentive, the economic incentives and the tax structure and everything else. Then you will start to see organically these types of ideas that Jim's talking about play themselves out in either new communities that are built or in repurposing the existing less than optimal sub-communities, bedroom communities, however you want to put them. So let me give you another example of something

because Sean, I think that you were alluding to or posing the question, how does the physical design of a place affect people's sense of community? And this is a kind of a psychological slash human neurology dynamic that scales from the small to the great. And you start with the idea that psychologically, in a human habitat, people like to feel safe and they like to feel secure, and to some degree, they benefit from feeling safely enclosed. And when I say that, I mean, if you go to a European town that's very old, as pre-automobile,

and you go down the streets, you know, and you will feel a sense of being in an outdoor public room. And what you're seeing there are many complex dynamics. One is that you can see where the ownership of public space begins and ends. And you can see that you can see a kind of gradual declension or transition from the private to the public. You have the ground floor. Let's say it's a storefront on both sides of the street. It's privately owned and privately managed. And then you have the sidewalk, which is public space, but it's sort of a transitional space between the inside and the outside.

Then you have the street itself, you know, which accommodates vehicles and stuff. Often you'll have something like a planting strip of trees on the sidewalk. And the purpose of that is to add another layer of formal definition to the street to provide a sense of security. and enclosure. In America, when our towns were formed, we uniformly planted elm trees all over eastern North America. And the reason that elm trees were great is because they were towering trees, very high, and they had very big crowns, which sometimes crossed over the street and formed like a ceiling on the street and gave you the sense of being in a magnificent, sheltered public place.

What's wrong with much of suburbia is that even where you get so-called public place or civic space or the abstraction known as green space, it's ambiguous. You can't tell what the ownership of it is. You can't tell often what the purpose of it is. And usually it's purely symbolic. You know, you'll see these kind of floral displays with flagpoles for veterans in the suburban shopping plazas. You know, nobody hangs out there. Nobody goes there.

They're strictly there to inform the people in the cars that the civic leaders supposedly care about the veterans. But, you know, people are very confused about public space. And when I was going around doing presentations, lectures, and colleges and public forums, you'd hear this clamor for, we want green space, we want public space. But what they were asking for was an abstraction. And usually an abstraction was exactly what was delivered,

a berm between the Kmart and the Walmart, which had the only purpose of which was for badly raised teenagers to set kitty cats on fire or some other make homemade tattoos or you know or you know give each other hand jobs in the

shrubbery that's you know that was a and what I'm describing is a severe degradation of public space but you know you go to a place where it's done properly you'll see a probably a high level of formal

design like if you go to a park in Paris the Parisians, the French are great at formal park design. And one of the things they do is they like to arrange things in orderly ranks. So you'll see the allays of the trees providing, you know, a sense of formality and definition to the walkway. You'll see the formal array of the benches. And they're deployed so that people can watch the other people walk. down the center because what you want to see is the people walking. You don't want to see

traffic. You don't want to see, you know, you want to see the people. So the French are very good at this. They use a very inexpensive material called pea gravel for most of the surface that you're walking on. You know, all you got to do is rake it, you know, dump it and rake it, and then there it is. Anyway, we don't do that in North America. What we do is we put up these stupid kind of nature band-aids, you know, informal, ambiguous arrays of different kinds of trees because we believe in diversity. So we'll put up, you know, a cherry tree, a Bartlett-Paira tree, a pine tree, you know. We just have no idea how to do this.

And we'll put up these giant concrete planter things that. create a kind of rapomatic environment for people to hide behind and, you know, threaten women. And we just don't know how to do this with public space. And the worst of it, of course, comes in the form of the so-called housing project where you get a tower in the park, right? The trouble is the park is public space that nobody seems to own or care for. and it ends up becoming just a very dangerous place for predators. And, you know, so.

Try to do the commons. Yeah, well, I guess my point is that the principles of town design and all the details of how to do it properly are well known in civilization, in Western civilization. Not so much in the American version of it. You know, we really lag behind. And the whole suburban project has made it a lot worse because we actually were, we did it pretty well. If you go back 100 years, 120 years to the early 1900s, you know, we had some really nice towns and cities. And we wreck them.

And we sort of committed suicide in our towns. And, you know, now we're left with the wreckage. And so the question is, you know, how are they going to get? it back together. My own guess is that it'll be an emergent process. It'll happen, you know, naturally because you can't force it. You know, you've got all this inertia in the systems that I've described, that time is described with finance and taxation and officialdom. So it's a range of problems. Think about, I haven't been following it for a while. Okay, I remember when it, when, you know, but the story in Detroit of, you know, where everyone, everything, like, completely

completely collapsed 15, 20 years ago. People were going in, you know, and they were, and I watched, you know, countless videos and read countless articles about this long, long time ago, well before I ever decided to start doing this shift for all of them. And I was really fascinated by this. And you just watched people go in and do real, honestly, try to do real, honestly, God, renovation. You know, they were doing urban gardening and they were doing, you know, they were trying to

re-appellate these spaces, these, these lots, these, these, these, uh, uh, uh, residential lots and and whatnot. Abandon blocks, all abandoned blocks and all of it and trying to like make that stuff, you know, improve that stuff. And of course, they're being harassed and by the county government, by the city government. They can't do that. It's against the law. Like, look, alcohol out of you. You, you people have mismanaged this into the ground. And now we're trying to rebuild it and the first thing you want to do is you go out there with your freaking handout and saying one you got to pass and to send some fucking you know third-rate inspector out there to go hey um you're doing it wrong and what's he what's he what's he asking for he's asking for a fucking

handout is what he's looking for an envelope he's looking for envelope full cash is what he's looking for i've been to Detroit many times in the last 20 years and i wrote a chapter about it and the geography of nowhere and um here here here's actually what it has happened there. The city is so poor that they actually can't afford to hire enforcement officers for their, you know, their housing codes and their building codes. So what happened over the last, you know, 20 years, and especially the last 15, 20 years, 10 or 15 years, is that you've gotten what's called guerrilla urbanism, guerrilla redevelopment. You have people who are on their own, buying small properties and redeveloping them where other people are doing it and creating nodes

on these radial avenues that come out of the center of Detroit, which is a radially designed plan. And they're creating small neighborhoods that have some life in them. I've got to say something about it, though, something else about it. One of my urban designer friends made the excellent point that it really needs to be understood. Our towns and cities are where they are because they occupy important geographical sites. Detroit is on a straight or river between two great lakes. It's a very important strategic site in North America, maybe one of the most important for both trade and defense. and there has been a settlement there for a long time,

and there will be one for a long time to come, but it's not going to be the Detroit of 1957 ever again, as far ahead as we can imagine. But something's going to be there. Now, Mr. Trump, and also, by the way, the podcaster Scott Adams, have made this proposal separately, that we can solve our urban problems

by building whole new cities out in the western hard pan and places where nothing exists. And I think that's a very bad idea for a lot of reasons. One is that these are not important strategic sites geographically necessarily. They're not on rivers or harbors or anything strategically necessary. Another thing is I'm not persuaded that the capital is going to be there because a lot of the capital that we have in our system now is a figment. It's an hallucination that for which there's I think every expectation a lot of a lot of it will disappear and just go up in a vapor. You know, the things that pretend to represent wealth, you know, the financial instruments

that aren't really worth what they pretend to be. So the money is not going to be there. the sites are bad bad sites we really need to fix the places that exist they exist in the geographical places that are most make the most sense to have a human settlement

and that's it's a very good point and it's a very, it is very important and we're hoping I was never persuaded by any of this like I was the whole archaeology thing that this that in Saudi Arabia.

I'm like, really, this is their vision of the future? Well, it's clearly their vision of the future. They want everybody in an easily surveilled or ecology where everybody's on a digital, some form of digital currency system, you know, be it on their phone or tattooed on. And they have the money. What's that? They have the money. Yeah.

And so, you know, that's not the way that's going to work. But we have to, again, going back to what I was talking about earlier, I think that, you know, Jim, you're laying out like all the things we all kind of want, certainly, which is to revitalize our, to become less deracinated and be, you know, and destroy it and bring people back together. Well, that's only going to happen if you change the dynamic of the way capital flows. Right now capital flows out of the towns and into the cities and then into the from the cities into the central government and then somewhere else. And I'm talking about the real, I'm not talking about money, I'm talking about wealth. Okay, wealth is different. Wealth is the things that you buy with money, whatever that, whatever that is to you, be it

a house, a home or a pile of gold or a pile of guns or whatever the hell it is. I don't give a shit. It could be, you know, you want to run a dog kettle. See, if that, if that makes you wealth, that makes you wealthy, a herd of goats. There are plenty of places in the world where a man's wealth is measured by the number of goats he owns. Like, this still exists in the world. by the way, folks.

So we have to change that dynamic. And I think one of the things that I'm encouraged by, regardless of Trump's other faults and some of the ideas that he throws out there, which he mostly just throws out there is, you know, big Zopa ideas in order to engage people's imagination to sell the idea. But what he's really trying to do is, I think he understands that we have. to change the dynamic of how wealth is generated and wealth generated at home stays at home as much as possible. And that's going to take a complete overhaul of the way we even conceive of

how we govern ourselves. And when we make that mental shift, we make that psychological and we just state it flat fucking out, this is what we want and we will accept nothing less, then things can really start to change. And then you'll just watch, you know, you'll just watch human ingenuity flourish. And, you know, what will be good for Lloydminster will be different than what's good for Saratoga, will be good, that will be different than what's good for Gainesville or the, or the satellite towns. But it's that hyperfinancialization of not understanding, not pricing risk of a project properly that we are all victims of in many ways. And our cities are victims of this.

Our communities are victims of this, which then translates down to our family and our children and everything else. And property development is especially risky because they're big projects often. And you plan them in one, you plan them at one time. And it takes 48 months to get the permits and the financing in line. And when you get that all finished and you're ready to go into the ground and build the things. thing, the economy has changed. Yeah. No, this is one of the things that Martin Armstrong was talking about.

And he wrote a blog post, I think over the weekend or on Friday or whatever, he was talking about this. He said, look, he said, the problem is not tariffs with Trump. It's not tariffs. It's taxation. We have to have a, if you want investment of the type and kind that Trump is talking about, if you want investment of the type and kind that you and I are talking about, Jim, you need to have some form of tax consistency.

whatever it is, there has to be consistency of policy in terms of what it is that we believe we're going to, how we're going to finance all of this stuff. What part, what role government's going to play. I happen to think it should be as little as fucking possible. That's fine. We can have that negotiation about how much government should be involved, but then we should make that decision and we should friggin stick with it. We need to stick with it for 20 years. We cannot have this shit of going back and forth where under Trump, we deregulate everything and, you know, And we make it easier for the car companies to build cars, people can afford to drive. And then Biden comes into power and repeals the shit on, you know, puts cafe back in place on day one and accelerates the process such that we all have to move the EVs by 2027 or whatever the hell the numbers.

I mean, this is the kind of thing that's going to preclude anybody overseas. And certainly the American companies that went out from coming back and to come back. It's a huge cost. They need to know that they're going to be, you know, they're going to be good for the 20 years it's going to take to get the return on investment on the frigging on the frigging projects in the first place. And then the secondary projects that go along with that and the tertiary projects. And I mean, this is all downstream of.

This is a systemic fucking problem. And I'm, and I, I'm telling you that is what, they get all the way back to what Sean invoked at the beginning. That is what the WEF is desperately trying to destroy and to ensure that never comes back because that way we wind up with nothing, then they can control whatever that is. And then they force on us, the archologies, the fake 15-minute towns, the total surveillance system, the total tax system, and all the rest of it. And they're going to force us all back in the cities.

Don't you think they're on the run, Tom? Oh, I do. I do. Absolutely, Jim. but I'm telling you that this is what they've been fighting. And they're going to continue to fight that fight for as long as they can until they're finally broken, which is why, Jim, every time I think through all of these problems this way,

my solution is break the Bank of England, break the ECB, break the European Union, because that's where the fucking shit rolls to. So kill those fucking people, and then we can start fixing America, and then we can start fixing everybody else. Well, they are breaking right now. The Ukraine thing is breaking them. The German government is broken, and they're not even close to resolving how that is going to play out.

They're just continuing to break more stuff, like threatening now to outlaw the most popular populist party that they have. Right. In the country. And, you know, France is maybe two years behind them because of Macron's term. The Netherlands has been in a state of, suspension for the last year with Gert Wilder's party won the election, and yet he's not allowed to become prime minister because they won't allow him to form a coalition.

So they stuck the head of their CIA in the prime minister's job. And then took the ruinous former prime minister and made him the head of NATO. Right, Ruta. Mark Ruta. Mark Ruta. So they're cracking up. And it would seem to me, I would like you to state what you think Mr. Trump's prospects are for reforming the tax system. They seem to be very ambitious from what I have gleaned.

Yeah, me too. And I'll tell you, having talked to some people who are close to the transition team, I have a couple of patrons who are close to the transition team, People that are, you know, they know people and got to, got, got. And we've talked. And, you know, thankfully being in the position I'm in where I've been banging these, my shoe on the table like Cruz Jeff about all these issues for so long, they're all like, Tom's the right guy to funnel this information to, right?

Because he gets it. I don't know how he got it, but he got it. Okay, great. Like, they're serious about cutting trillions of dollars of waste from the budget. They're absolutely dead serious. I'm not going to say everything that I've heard because I'm waiting until the inauguration. to be honest with you about some of the things I've heard because I don't want to jinx anything. But I can tell you that it's, you know, there are ways of doing this that are quite easy

and quite legal. There's a lot of money that flows out of Washington that is under the direct control of the executive branch. Remember that Congress passes the laws and the executive implements those laws and how they're implemented is what, Trump controls. And if he puts the right people in charge of the agencies and he puts the, and those people hire the right people and they do the needs to be done, there's a lot that can be done very, very quickly. And then we start thinking about the aspects of the cabinet that are going to scare the goddamn bejesus out of the entrenched power structure in Washington. I'm thinking specifically about Matt Gates as Attorney General and Tulsi Gabbard at the head of DNI, that

these two people together form the, form the, the, the statement that, oh, by the way, if you don't come forward, you're going to get run over, the bus is going to run over you as always everything else. But if you know where the bodies are buried and you've got the information and you've been keeping all their secrets, well, let us know what those secrets are, mind you. And we'll take care of you. And then we'll get rid of them. Like, this is a very brittle power structure that's been created here. It looks unassailable because it's so freaking big, but it's incredibly brittle. Well, it looks pretty time that you have here as brittle. Is this a perfect, it's a perfect word for this. It looks unassailable because, you know, one

group has had, one factions had their hands on the levers of power for so long. Yeah, they're doing this, like they have their thumb on the pulse of everything and like, you know what I mean? But you take those thumbs off and, and, you know, they're brittle. Well, well, I was talking to Larry Johnson the other day. And, you know, I went and I re invoked a part of the podcast that he and I first did together. When we first time we ever, we ever chatted. And I got Larry to talk about how hard it was for junior CIA analysts doing real

honest-to-God intelligence work, coming up with good information that needs to be passed up the chain of command. But they can't because the entire power structure above them are they're all careerists trying to figure out how they're going to get ahead. and they will not allow good information to filter up because it'll make them look bad and it'll keep them from getting promoted. So from the top down,

the pressure is all down, not, and it's not being allowed to, and the information is not being allowed to filter up. Now, Gabbard would be in charge of DNI, depending on who you put in charge of the FBI, depending on, you know, the C, a ratcliff at the CIA. Now all of a sudden it's a different culture at the top, And the careerists are going, oh, it's to buy advantage to allow good information to flow up the chain of command,

up the verticals, as opposed to suppress that information and, you know, never let it see the light of day. You know, it's, this is a, this is a metaphor of this process. It's not a metaphor. It's an example. And you can see it in so many other areas of human endeavor. You can see it in foreign policy. You can see it in how, you know, people resist and have reacted to. the resistance to American hegemony in the Middle East.

I used the example of what Putin did when he to buy unlawed. By going into Syria in 2015, he did the exact same thing. He was successful. He walked in. He beat the help beat the crap out of ISIS. By the way, he got help from the Americans on the ground to identify where these guys are. The Russians bombed them gave the Syrian Arab army the support they needed to wipe these

guys out, take out al-Qaeda and ISIS and everything. else they stayed out of each other's way and Putin showed the world that you can stand up to the hegeman you can stand up the NATO and not die. In fact, yeah. And that's a very, that's a very empowering moment for all the all the people in the region. If we look back at that, the, the American forces of one kind or another were on both sides. You know, we were supporting ISIS and we were fighting ISIS. Well, that's what I mean. That was clearly what that was what, that was going on there. Yeah, it was a circle jerk.

Of course it was. You know, and so, you know, so much of what we've, what, you know, so much of our commentary and so much of the general, like, Millew, you talked about this a little bit, I think you touched on this somewhat earlier, and which is that it's not learned helplessness, right, but it kind of is, right? that we, like the kids learned not to be curious and go out and learn and explore and be empowered as kids, you know, growing up to Syruvia. Well, at the same time, everybody's got this idea that we can't change these things because the system is too vast and complex to change. Well,

maybe it's not. Elon Musk famously walked into Twitter and fired 80% of the, of the workforce on, you know, on Friday. Yeah, carrying a stink. Carried all. Come up. I mean, let this sink in. Did you see Alex Jones walk back into Info Wars with the kitchen sink the other day after the judge invalidated the onion sale? I was fucking howling, dude. It was so funny. Like, you know.

I even heard of Alex that that Musk might buy info wars. Yeah, he might and then just turn it back over to Alex and say, you know, give me 20% of the dick pills and we'll move on. It's interesting, Tom. You know, you bring up, well, both you bring up very interesting points. The one that, well, multiple are sticking with me, but you think the system is so vast. You know, like you go, it's just got to run its course, but running its course could be 500 flipping years for all I know. Could be? Right?

Like, let's not act like we got three years. Yeah. It's got in boom. It's gone. I don't think that we're, I think we're more, as Tom, like to say, brittle. We're more brittle than the Romans were. We're not going to have a 500-year decline. Our shit is way too complex and interdependent and fragile.

And it just fraught with inflection points of failure. And we're seeing them fail right now. Sure. But all I would add to that is is, you know, and Musk is an interesting character, right? He buys Twitter, he walks in, he says, marches 80% out. He does a bunch of different things. And you can see what one person thinking outside the box, I would say, goes that and that and that and what he's had and you go when you're looking at cities and trying to build community

people are looking for these ideas and all it takes is one of them to just like spark and you could see that maybe happen real fast because the way ideas transfer right now is really really quick people start not with the inertia of officialdom and not with not with the habits of the of the development of the industry those those are true this drag on things getting done I have been involved in many what are called charettes or stakeholder meetings for development projects when I was involved with the new urbanists. And the amount of inertia in the system is really incredible. And you combine that with the amount of incomprehension and ignorance in the public who, you know, they just don't want. There's a reason that we see this phenomenon called nimbism, you know, not in my backyard. The NIMBY. It's because they have been conditioned, for example, by 80 years of getting architecture projects in their town that they hate, that make their town worse, that make them feel bad. And so the default setting for those people is not to get me a better building.

The default setting is nature. Give me a green space. I don't want to have that building. I'd rather have green space. And that often defeats the whole purpose of trying to make the center of town richer and better designed. And frankly, just to put more buildings along the street so you don't have all these missing teeth and empty lots. and in Saratoga, where I lived in the 1970s and the 80s, there were all these stupid battles.

Every time there was talk about developing an empty lot on our main street, a whole band of people would come to the town meeting and say, we want green space there. We want green space. We don't want a building. And so they built this supposedly little pocket park on what had been in an empty lot on the main street. And it became one of those rapomatic

places where nobody wanted to go. They put a bunch of concrete planters in it for people to hide behind. And that's where the Winoes went. And that's where the mental patients went. Because you didn't create the incentive for people to go there with the surrounding, the rest of the area was,

I've seen not the same thing, but I've seen them try multiple revital. projects downtown in Gainesville. And they keep trying and they keep trying and they keep trying. And the only one that they can actually, you know, and it's like you can't make force this into existence. You've got to let people figure it out for themselves. But post-cript, after 30 years of having this ambiguous, ridiculous, stupid, empty space

in the town, they finally caved in and allowed a developer to build a building there. And they repaired part of the main street, which, now functions beautifully. So they learned that lesson that, you know, that defaulting to some abstract notion of nature is not as good. What you need is to have actual buildings in the center of town. There was another one that was really fascinating. There was, in the 19th century in Saratoga Springs,

there was a magnificent grand hotel called the Grand Union Hotel. It was the biggest hotel in the world at its time. And it was all made of wood. It was like a seven, eight-story building. It occupied an entire large block as a liner building along the edge of the block with a courtyard in the center. And it was demolished in 1954. And it was replaced by a strip mall that had a Grand Union supermarket.

No relation to the hotel. Right. Grand Union. The humor of history and God. Right. You know. God, Grand Union, Jesus Christ.

And the thing is, you know, this is the kind of thing that happened in America in the 1950s. These UFOs would land, you know, in like a strip mall, would land like a UFO. And it wouldn't take off for 50 years. Yeah. It would be there. It persists through this 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 80s. Finally, you know, it was getting kind of tired. And there was a green agitation militancy unit in town that wanted to improve the situation there.

So they forced the Grand Union strip mall to take another 20 feet of their parking lot from the sidewalk, which was way, you know, the strip mall was set back 150 feet from the sidewalk, right? It was all parking in the front. They made them take another 20 feet or so from the parking lot and create what they called a green space, all right, which was just a rectangular strip that ran the whole length of the block with grass in it. And this was supposed to be an improvement. Now, first of all, realize the strip mall was across the street from the most important formal park in town, Congress Park, which is about, I don't know, five-acre park, you know, full of stuff. And so they thought that this would be, you know, a useful addition to the town.

Well, what happened? Well, over the period of the next two or three years, nobody took care of the grass. The rain formed rivulets that turned into gullies that eventually washed away all the topsoil. And the whole thing was it's just a complete failure. Just a stupid, stupid project that somebody had probably spent $20,000. dollars to execute. And this stuff is, is, is everywhere. And it's just, it's, you know, I can get into bike paths and I, you know, I, I, I, I,

rails to trails. Yeah, yeah, all this stuff. And I'm like, like, it's, it's all fake. Like, you know, we, you know, the, the, the, the, the county slash city commission in Gainesville to the Otter County City Commission and the city of Gainesville commission merged ages ago. So they're like one big, you know, they're like one big committee of suck. And seriously.

And like they spend, because my wife, my wife used to work at public works. She was to work at the, you know, she used to work in public works. She used to work at Supervisor of Elections. She was there, all this stuff. And they used to laugh about, okay, well, the county was making them go out and plant trees between, you know, divide the roads and plant trees in the middle, the between them to create visual friction to get people to slow down and do this and all this stuff in the middle of nowhere. Like, why are you? you know, why are you this? Because they, what they really like is they like the idea. Oh,

and then they created like land use plans where if you wanted to like, if you, for example, this is a 20 year old project problem. If you had an old parcel of land, I mean, a lot of, a lot of certainly the south is broken up into what were sections, which are square miles, and then there's quarter sections and then there's 20 acre parcels from there. If you want to to break up a 20 acre parcel, which is a quarter section of a quarter section of a quarter section of a quarter section. If you wanted to break it up in the four or five acre lots, owned agricultural, which is a smallest lot that you can, you can, you can build. You can, you can, you can make. Then if you broke it up in the four or five acre lots, the four

housing, the, the, the, the, the, the, the center four acres were the only place where anybody could build. So if you took a, I took a classic one quarter mile by one eighth mile, which is a 20-acre quarter section, a 20-acre parcel, you know, drew, bisectors threw it. All four of the houses had to be in the four acres in the center in order to preserve the rest of the green space because they didn't matter what the land, didn't matter, you know, it was, the land could be used that way. It didn't matter if these people, like, moved out into the country because they wanted to get away from the insanity. It didn't matter. Well, everybody had to be right on top of each other, miserable. And basically, and what they,

also did by doing that was of course they destroyed the value of the of the of the of the of the land so that people trying to sell the land in order to like you know let let let it be developed no and then on top of that the county wouldn't maintain the roadways they would charge people on a per lot basis to whenever they would if they did the um they wouldn't just take the tax money to you know to to to pave a road that everybody without was living on no they would say no no you have to pay for that Meanwhile, they're funneling four mills. Like the electrical counties are some of the highest taxes in the state of Florida, by up against the total, the state mandated limit.

And then they have special taxing districts and they have this and they have that in order to break the rules. Like I can go on and on and on. Well, those were, Tom, we saw a lot of that in the end of the 20th century and onward. And they were artificial attempts to try to overcome the, you know, the tendency to just create, you know, create large lot residential development. But they did not, they never had a chance of succeeding at creating a hamlet or a small town because it just wasn't enough concentration of everything.

Well, worse than that, Jim, if you really listen to them, and I went to enough county commission meetings to listen to them and talk, What they really wanted was they wanted to get in their cars on Sunday afternoon and drive out into the country. And they didn't want their experience of driving out into the country ruined by seeing a house. They wanted everybody off the road so they could just, you know, they could see the, so they could drive around and see the people with their foregoats in the backyard or, oh, isn't that lovely? Like, it's all bullshit. It was all about motoring and scenery. Yeah.

It was never about anything else. It was never about, it never made any sense. in terms of trying to slow down development. But these are the unforeseen repercussions of becoming a mandatory motoring society. You know, that's what's one of the outcomes that you get. And it's unfortunate. And, you know, we're going to have to kind of drift away from that as organically as possible. Well, I mean, but the other thing, the other side of this is, and I don't mean to be, to be rude or anything.

But when you live in a place that's big, like Sean lives in a place that's big and flat. It doesn't get bigger or flatter than, you know, northern Saskatchewan or northern, Northern Alberta. I'm right on the border. So you're right on the border in Alberta and Saskatchewan. I live in rural North Florida. It's pretty big and flat. Okay.

It's easier to build out than it is to build up. It's been to build together. It is what it is, right? America's a lot bigger. In places, certainly in the northeast, every time I go back up, you know, anywhere close to the mountains, like there's only certain places. you can freaking build. And so you need to have, you know, it makes more sense for people to cluster and everything else because bringing those services, bringing like standard services, water, sewer, this,

that, everything else is incredibly expensive. In Florida, it's really not. Like, it's sandy soil, we can all run, we can all, we, it's not hard. It's all not, it's so much of it, so much of it is they, they use the canard of environmental policy and of environmental land use effects and everything else in order to just flat out stop development. Okay. I can give you, I mean, I can go on for an hour about the fights we've had, you know, discussed with the county about the county maintained road. We live back a private easement that's privately maintained. I've spent a lot of money making sure that my, my, my, my, that private easement is actually not swallowing cars over the, over the last five years. This is my, this is one of the few things that I've done for the neighborhood. I've spent probably 12 grand just

bringing in limerock and building the road up over the course of the last few years. But the county maintained road is clearly below the like the is been cut out of, of the, of the, of the land. The land is like six inches to a foot above the road. When it, we live in Florida, we get 14 inches of rain like that every once in a while. And then the road washes out, but everybody still has to be able to get back and forth. Now, it's all beach sand. the land drains almost immediately, but it's still a ruddy fucking mess. And the county is not allowed to move the water, period.

And it's all Planet Pines that this road is cutting. It's not like it's going on to somebody's front yard. Okay. It's literally we can dump it into the planted pines that, you know, my neighbor has, you know, in 20 acres worth of civil culture, he could use the water. But no, no, no, we can't move the water because it's against, it's against state. state we have to have doing environmental assessment and this and that and everything else. I'm like, the county doesn't have the money for that.

Like the road should the road be built up, probably. We can't even get under emergency management purposes. Can we get them to come in here and do so? The one time they did after a hurricane, they came in and they put a whole bunch of item four on that same road that I've spent a lot of money on and built the road up. And then guess what they did? All the way they created the road, it all washed right into my mom's front yard. And you know what my mom did?

She complained and forced them to take it all up. And they use the excuse of, well, our emergency vehicles couldn't get back to the road. So we have the right to come in and do this. And we're like, no. And then we dealt with it. Thankfully, my wife and my father-in-law have, you know, oodles of experience of building roads. Okay. So if you were going to get the shit, we actually had specific like knowledge in this area.

Okay. And we're able to like get the road built up to the point where it was like it's mostly functional. If you were the god of North America, how what would you do with this sort of overregulation? I get rid of every goddamn bit of it. I would get literally I would get rid of every goddamn bit of it because it's all anti-human. Every fucking bit of it. All these people have unbelievable amounts of knowledge about their specific areas and about where they live and everything else. We all know what the hell has to be done.

I've got, I got half a dozen friends. I've either worked for the county public works or, you know, they, they do tractor work and all this stuff. I'm like, we all look at this stuff.

We can fix this in an afternoon. We're not allowed. Well, Tom or Jim or both here, right, we started this out, you know, talking about 15 minutes cities and going down this,

you know, like how do you create community, community and different things? One of the things, As you're talking both of you more and more, I'm like, can we not agree the stupidity of a large government and creating law upon law upon law so you can't do anything anymore? Even if you own the land, right? Then you have to get 12 different, even if you could build wherever you want. Then they, then they're like, yes, but you have to do this and you got to do that.

You got to do this. You know, the most recent one is my parents have lived in the same spot for 30 plus years. Their deck was falling apart. So they tore it down and built a new one. And then they had to come get assessments on the new deck that had been put in the same spot as the old one. Nothing had changed. And they had to go through a whole bunch of paperwork over and over again. And you're like, why even go there?

And yet that's where we are. I try to send my son. As a kid, I grew up in small rural community. If you wanted to go over to the neighbor's house that lived, I don't know, 10 miles away, he just walked on a bus and said, oh, you're going over to that person. Okay, now you went. Try to get my son to do that. And we had to file paperwork to get my kid to go on a rural school bus.

So you go like, yeah, communities can be fixed by how the city's laid out. Okay, sure. But when we got stupidity going on on how you, like every form of building or doing anything community, probably none of this gets fixed. Sean, there was a literally over the weekend, I saw, I saw a thing on Twitter. There's a woman being prosecuted by the state of Georgia for allowing your kid to walk one mile to go to her friends at. go to his friend's house. I'm like a mile. I used to walk three miles of town to go get a candy bar. Like we used to, my friend and I, we used to get, when we were 15 or 14 before we got our

driver's licenses, we went to the community. We got the town I lived in there. There was a community park that had big pool and racquetball courts and all sorts of stuff right next, right down from my high school that we wound up going to. And I used to go there all the time. Parents would just drop us off there during day during the summer. We'd hang out there all afternoon. We'd shuffleboard and racquetball and go swimming and all the rest of this stuff, right? He and I used to every Saturday morning, we'd get up, I'd ride my bike over to his place. I'd pick, we ride into town, go play racquetball for an hour and a half. It's a three mile ride, three mile bike ride along, along, you know, along roads,

along roads with cars and traffic and everything else. Like, what hell's wrong with these people? We didn't even think twice about it. But, you know, I mean, maybe not three miles, two and a half miles. like and I yeah but we're we're I'm a generation removed from people who didn't finish high school

who were in my area who went directly into running a farm managing a ranch building a business on and on and on so when you look at the generations that have come after you know they let's just play this out they finished high school most of went to university college

they didn't have kids till later they babyed their kids up on and on and on and I'm no perfect person on this side by any stretch. Sure. But you just go like at some point, you were like eight years old and you were out stook in the hay, right? Like you were, you were, you were having to work. And now my eight year old wouldn't even know what, well, I mean, you probably

love it honestly, but we don't do that anymore. We have different machines, different things that just do that. Like you, where I sit and Jim hasn't been here. I have been to Edmonton and. Oh, my. apologies. I just meant sorry where I sit like actually this community. But in fairness, you know, like it were a hundred years away from where their entire livelihood was just surviving. Like they had no choice. If they didn't move, they froze to death or they starved or they,

you know, in the grass fires, it ran as fast as the fastest horse. They burnt up, right? Like the stories are pretty horrific to where we sit now. It's just a different point. You know, a hundred years from now, things may be very very. very different than we can imagine. Just as a thought exercise, I used to try to imagine what it was like for somebody in Germany born in the early 20th century who had experienced how wonderful Europe functioned in like 1911, you know, and what it would be like for them to walk through the rubble of Berlin in 1946, you know, where everything was reduced to gravel. And, you know, things turn out in very unexpected ways. There are two points that I would like to make. And we might have to, I have to get

on with some other things. So maybe we can wrap this up. But one is that life is tragic. And by that, I don't mean that everything ends unhappily. I mean that life is difficult for every everybody. And life is often shocking and surprising for everybody. The other thing is my personal theory of history, which is that things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. That's why a lot of things happen, even world wars, and also the way our towns and cities are designed. And so things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time and then times change. And they don't. don't seem like such a good idea anymore. And, you know, people adapt. So what we're probably

looking at is the need for, we're facing a great deal of adaptation, necessary adaptation, for times that are now changing pretty severely. And I'm just confident that the human race is intelligent enough to be able to do that. We've come off of this fantastic orgy of wealth and comfort and convenience. And now we're entering another era, which I happen to think is going to be an era of more difficulty in hardship and scarcity in many ways.

And we'll see how this, you know, what will seem like a good idea at the time in the year 2050. Tom, any final thoughts before I lay you up? No, I think, not really. I think Jim's got, I think Jim's right about this. I just, my, my thought on all of this,

is that, you know, I saw a great quote from Patten the other day. It said, he said, don't tell people what to do. Show them where to go and then be, and then you'll be amazed at what they accomplish. And, you know, I think that that's, that's the moment where we have an opportunity. I think this moment gives us the opportunity to think in those terms, you know. And let's, you know, and, and yet, just because you can't see. a solution to a problem doesn't mean one doesn't exist. That's a huge one. You know, that they take some, you know, sincere humility to realize that, yeah, just because you don't figure, you can't

figure it out. And that's where NIMBYism comes from. That's where so many of these, these, this desire to control a thing that's not under their control comes from. And it plays itself out at every level. Let's, you know, let's back away from the anxiety. Let's back away from all that. And let's go, hey, man, what can we build today? Wouldn't that be fun? Let's go build something. Let's go, you know, and that's what we did when we were kids. What are we going to do this afternoon?

I don't fucking know, but I don't want to play, I don't, you know, I don't want to play baseball on the street anymore. So let's go do something else, you know. Jens, thanks for hopping on. Sean, it's been a pleasure. Jim is always good. It's good to see you as always. Thanks, Sean.

Yeah, I look forward to the next round. Absolutely.