TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #491: Bitcoin Urbanism with Tuur Demeester, Kelly Lannan & Austin Tunnell

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Marty sits down with the Tuur, Kelly and Austin after the Bitcoin Urbanism panel for an extended chat about fiat real estate, walkable cities, beautiful architecture, and more. Tuur on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester Kelly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ktlannan Austin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AustinTunnell 0:00 - Intro 5:05 - Introducing guests 14:03 - Fiat real estate and centralized planning 22:48 - Environment and psychology 34:33 - Gradually, Then Suddenly 35:12 - Efficiency can be bad for your health 44:15 - Real estate is a shitcoin 55:14 - Social breakdown and families 58:48 - Suburbs becoming slums 1:02:52 - Municipal infrastructure 1:07:43 - Community 1:17:09 - Definancializing real estate 1:22:43 - Sustainability 1:28:55 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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them to tftc send you and enjoy this rip okay you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be we're all allergic allergic to the government yes gentlemen we are live incredible event last night terry you pumped it up on this show a couple weeks ago and it far surpassed my expectations i'm so glad we did it i mean honestly and it came together so easily

i feel like it was just bound to happen like you know it it's everybody here you know uh who who organizes the, the events at Bitcoin Commons was just so accommodative. And then of course, you know, Austin was so enthusiastic right away. And Kelly was also on board, like both of them, like came in from out of state. Um, yeah, it was amazing. It was awesome. The energy in the room was electric. It was awesome. Yeah. Awesome. What was it like for you? I don't remember it very well. I, uh, I drove, like I said, I had a two hour, two and a half hours of sleep the night before. Cause we had a baby on Saturday and, uh, don't worry. My family's both taken care of. I have people staying over the house my wife told me to go uh to be clear um seven hour drive literally

right up here speaking and then at the end of it i was like i i couldn't even really think afterwards so i don't really know what happened i'm not 100 sure what all i said i was telling these guys this morning but i think it went really well i did too i mean i think i think your connection of like what you're building and like applying low time preference to bringing beautiful sound architecture back to the world and connecting that to the Bitcoin standard. I think for the benefit of the audience who wasn't here to hear the presentation last night,

I think it'd be good to get backstory on how you two met and when you decided to reach out to Austin to come give this presentation. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to remember when I might've discovered building culture, like Austin's company, I think maybe around the pandemic or something. like i just uh saw you know these these i think it was when you the the original mundor project

like that those those four and seeing the images float around with that and then really starting to follow it um is when i was like huh like this is this is special because it like there are brick buildings around the u.s but it's extremely rare to find builders who do this and uh and so yeah the boldness really attracted me and um just to kind of also what impressed me is the even though it's a young company like the the continual evolution of the style and the kind of like the the ideas and then you know seeing that like he he goes abroad to learn about like you know vaulted ceilings and how that can be done um and um so um me and my wife decided uh we're actually going to a format festival in arkansas and so we kind of planned a little road trip and it was like

let's stop in in oklahoma city and there was there happened to be an open day where the the um what is it i was hosting an open house yeah an open house one of our our first structural masonry build in oklahoma city yeah so we we yeah so we went and saw it the whole thing and and uh they they also um you know did the interior so it's it's really just this incredible um beautiful house and uh yeah so we we we saw it we were just you know very impressed unfortunately you can't just you know it's kind of like if this house was in the neighborhood that we wanted it's like we we really might have been buyers um but uh but we live in austin of course but yeah so we started talking and, um, kept in touch since. And, uh, I really wanted, uh, Austin to come over to the

city of Austin to like, uh, share his story, uh, somehow. And so eventually we just made it happen last week. Yeah. It's a good way to do it. South by Southwest. I think we had some South by Southwest overflow coming in last night. What was it? What was it like for you getting introduced to the Bitcoin community? It's been cool. Um, and fun. Cause it was kind of recent, you know, when, when Tor called me about it, I don't know, six, eight weeks ago or something. And I was just like, a lot of times when things like this happen, I just say, you know, cause I had met him recently. Like I just say yes.

And then see what happens later. And it was like literally kind of an offhand comment at the end of it, where he mentions the Bitcoin standard, which then led to me reading the Bitcoin standard, which led to me being kind of my mind blown about what I can't believe I was just telling Kelly on the way here that over the past 10 years, you know, I keep up with, you know, current events and media and stuff like that. And I've known the price of Bitcoin, like generally speaking, I've even owned a Bitcoin and sold it you know and and none of the articles and none of the media talks about why why is it a

big deal why does it matter and so for me that's the important part is like understanding the under you know underlying philosophy of it and then so immediately made the connection of like oh these people are shared values and that's what i look for my company is shared values whether it's employees or customers or trades or vendors is we need people that share the values and the mission. And so like, I just got excited about that, you know, of talking to other people in a different group that think differently than me that know about different things, but that have this, yeah, shared value. I think it's, it was a breath of fresh air for the Bitcoiners in the room, because we've been quietly screaming to ourselves, like, we need more people to get this.

I think that's what we're really honing in on is like, find these tangential movements that are align philosophically and like be like hey we love what you're doing we think you'd love bitcoin too and it's just a perfect marriage particularly when you dive into what you were talking about last night specifically the patient capital part like you need sound money to have patient capital and you know this firsthand kelly yeah it's um it's it's come to a point and we kind of discussed this last night it's come to a point where when you're trying to build things you're reaching the end of the time horizon for what you know credit or capital is willing to do today so a typical development project may take you five or six years right from very beginning to very end whether

that's buying the land getting the entitlements doing the construction filling it up selling it all these other things so you're reaching essentially the end of a lot of people's patience to deliver a return so when you start to combine you know basically the the speed of construction that you need the materials that you need to accomplish that speed it really starts to scale back on what you can build so when you see pictures of austin's projects that are beautiful brick masonry stuff and then you look at you know across the street even or somewhere else it's like how on earth did that get built and we're we're really reaching a point like i said we're we're we're at the end of what capital is really willing to put up with so you know when you have a

different kind of money that's you know quite frankly looking to wait you know like bitcoin is when we say we have low time preference we're really we're literally discounting the future saying we're willing to wait um so you know it's it's it's a very interesting point where there's two at least in our community there's two forces that are going at each other it's how does the fiat system you know continue to function how do we continue to stay in business when we have to work like that and on the flip side we know that this is coming so how do we prepare ourselves and plan or design so that when the time is right we can pick up and continue um and i'm sure austin can speak to this because he's he's worked you know with master masons it's just there's not

there's not the skill today that exists in order to pick up you know in the the patient capital low time preference construction methods and craftsmanship versus what we have to work with today so um i think it's a very interesting dynamic but uh i i'm you know i'm a big fan of what he talked about last night and how he put it um and uh yeah i'm i was i was stoked i think last night went great and i hope that uh you know there's more um more people within the real estate construction business that have you know similar values and are thinking to themselves like you know we've gotten to this point now where we're quite literally worried about the durability of some of these buildings and they're being slapped together and you know across the street if Austin

builds a brick house you know everybody's looking at each other then looking across the street at this house and saying you know wow where's you know why can't I have a house like that or why isn't there more houses like that so um patient capital i think is really what opens the door for that the fiat systems not necessarily set up for that it's probably the antithesis of that but um very much looking forward to that changing yeah that's crazy to think i think big winners like the fiat standard is here on the bookshelf and talks about all areas of our life where fiat money has corrupted these systems whether it's health care education um finance whatever it may be but i think the most visibly where it's most visibly

pronounced is like real estate and housing and going like where the it's an industry where the incense has been so perturbed that what you're doing austin is like a heroic act of us because the incentives are such where you're incentivized to build cheap shitty houses that are not durable that are basically built to last for 30 years. Yeah, no, and it's hard what we're doing. I was talking, like, we don't, we're constantly having to, you know, now that we're building houses, you know,

we're almost done building spec houses because we can't do it anymore because the system's so broken that, you know, like I said, we build a great house. Everyone loves it. The buyer even wants to pay for it. And the appraiser come in and just says, the house next door is worth X, you know,

so that's what your house is worth and that's what the bank will loan on it. And so then the buyer can't buy the house, even though it's a way better house. They're just saying this shitty house over here, you know, it's just so stupid. And that's just one example of the million things we have to deal with. And, you know, and then when you're raising money for a project like what Kelly's doing, more development or what we're doing, too. And you're looking investors in the eye and saying we're going to do this, you know, and then timelines start getting messed up or whatever. Budget overages, you have to value engineer or you'll never do another deal again.

You know, it's not like people are bad that are doing this. And that's why I finally realized it's like the key here is patient capital. It has to be. But I do think you can still do it on a fiat system, you know, like because I don't know how long it's going to take for like what is going to happen. Like this could be a very long thing that plays out over a long period of time. But I mean, you see more because the fiat, if you can create great places in architecture that people love, it's going to be desirable for a long period of time. It's going to cash flow for a long period of time, inflation, market turnover, whatever. It doesn't really matter if you've got no debt or low debt on it.

And so that's kind of what my current bet is that I'm going to start working on is trying to find people that think that way, even if they're not Bitcoiners per se. Although I think the Bitcoin mindset is awesome for it. But like, hey, who wants to rather than trying to like put try to get a five year, seven year exit, put your money in, keep it there for 20 years and then look what we get to build with it. look you've helped contribute to the world and i think there's people out there like that yeah i mean tur your presentation you're basically like it is going to be bitcoiners i mean i believe so i mentioned this two weeks ago i've never seen you more bullish last night's presentation you're like we're gonna take over the world and rebuild it in a beautiful way yeah i mean like if you look at then that's what was my point in the presentation is like just we always think of ourselves as like

you know we are bitcoiners and we want to do certain things but at some point the scale of bitcoin becomes so big that we really start becoming uh an important part of global culture and not just in terms of production of ideas but actually producing physical footprint in the world so like based on the the estimates of glass node there's now um 2500 people in the world we don't know who they are and it's a good thing who um who have more than 50 million dollars worth of bitcoin And that means they are 1% of the global financial elites, of global ultra high net worth people. So if we go to a million dollar Bitcoin, that becomes 10%, 10% of the global elites. If we go to $5 million Bitcoin, all of a sudden we're talking 30, 40% of global elites are people that have kind of the foundation of their wealth is it was in Bitcoin.

just like how the dot-com entrepreneurs really made a huge dent and and became like the most prominent wealthy people just like how in the the early 19th century um you had the oil barons and things like that so so it's just this is like a new era it's what i truly believe and so you know we want to we're also like we have these strong values like we we want to do things differently and leave a mark and like kind of like show that we we really care about durability about utility about beauty and so i think it's gonna it's gonna mean that we're gonna lean into classical architecture again which which means you know just building solid amazing sturdy buildings for the next generations um to to kind of also you know it's it's it's great it's beautiful but

i think it's also gonna show the world that like hey just like when you go to venice and you see those renaissance building it's like that period was special like you know it takes a special thing to build a special building and so i think there's going to be a lot of enthusiasm for for um and i want to further explore that that idea like what does it even mean bitcoin urbanism you know where do we want to take it um to kind of go from fiat slums to like you know bitcoin neighborhoods you know what does that look like and that's why i wanted to you know help help start this conversation yeah you get you got a clap from the pleb pleb lab builder day out there as you're going on i just heard that it was called pleb lab and that was very funny

the uh no it's like like building and i i really like what you kelly and also you two focused on last night we're like how do we fix this and kelly you mentioned like centralization got us into this problem you can't there's no top-down design that's going to fix this it's got to be block by block and we were shortly discussing before you hopped on stage i think i'm a huge fan of chuck marone and strong towns that book i think changed my perspective on how to look at these things and it is the right way it's going to take a lot of hard work it's literally going to be block by block and i think bitcoiners it's funny you say block by block in the physical world and like that's literally big like a bitcoin uh yeah that confused me for a moment when he said

that it's like yeah because we think block by block it's going to be a long arduous road but it's literally just going to be small acts by individuals and companies like builder sculpture to like materialize and go attack this massive problem and that's what's you know you mentioned block by block and that's exactly how we think about it like the the the little rendering i showed last night of what we're doing it's about half of a block it's a little over an acre we don't have a full block quite yet but we're already making that work in kind of normal environments even though we'll probably be doing concrete block because we're really about masonry based systems but you know if you have patient capital and if you are actually building something

truly great that is creating real value that people love you can actually you know you can buy it what we do is we buy blocks you can buy blocks and blow them up you know what i mean like buy blocks, tear down the old houses that are, you know, a tiny 1,000 square foot house and a 7,000 square foot lot, and completely remake it, just create a little village per block, essentially, is what you can do. And that's really possible, because in the current fiat system, you could say, capital has a real, and it's less about fiat system, just the time horizon of an investment, like, you really can't do that, because you have to, like, you can only pay so much for the

house if you want to buy that block, you know what I mean? But if you actually have patient capital and you've got kind of a 20 to 30 year time horizon, you can pay $50,000 extra for that house. And it's not going to matter. And you can beat everyone else out at doing it. And then you can create an amazing place, you know, and by the way, the people you're displacing, right? If maybe if you're offering them, you know, above market, they're just like, take my house and love it and go. And you can also do swaps and say, hey, if we let us buy this, we'll, you know, let you buy this at the same price. So you actually stay in the same neighborhood.

And that's why I talk about relationships, too, is so important that you can't just come in and impose stuff. You know, we talk about being anti-centralization, and that's where I think it really is important. You know, Strongtown's point, a ground up thing, people on the ground that know their neighborhood, Kelly and Scottsdale, you know, people in Austin, me in Oklahoma City and Edmond, you know, where I know the place and I know the people and I care about the place and the people. and, and we can build real places like that, you know, and respond because, uh, man, people are complex, you know, and we want to make people not complex, you know, as if we're just like robots or something or widgets and we just need like food and shelter. It's like, no, no, no. I mean, humans are profoundly deep and, um, emotional and connected and all sorts of other things that I think we really have to keep in mind when we're, when we're building these places.

yeah well the other side of the coin there too is like humans are complex emotionally driven individuals and that's like it's like we dove dove into this the first time it came on the show but like the physical space that you live in literally affects you psychologically and the physical space that has taken over our world in america is ugly brutalist and the day in the life examples that you gave yesterday it's like how do we get away from the typical day in the life in america now to the one that you put forth that exists in europe in a few cities in america i'm from philadelphia and i do think philadelphia is a great downtown it's great walking city it's got its problems obviously but you can see that it was built in the time before fiat money in a lot

of areas absolutely yeah and like like i grew up in a in in bruges in belgium and so um i remember recently a friend of mine like fell on harder times like financially and he um his life is actually not that different from before like you know he can in terms of like like he doesn't even need a car like he's like bike around and and and and and just like there's so many beautiful places that are just available and that are exactly built in in the way that you're talking about these like you know tiny little parks that are just kind of hidden inside a block uh very very narrow streets things like that um uh it really is is quite amazing what it does to like the quality of life to to whereas like if if you're poor here in austin i imagine your life changes dramatically

like as soon as you lose access to a car like that it just turns everything upside down yeah and uh and then and then you're relegated to whatever housing projects and you're kind of like being siloed you know uh and you get more and more i feel like it's it's more of a trap um even though i i still think mobility is is way uh you know more powerful in the u.s still than in europe like you you can work your way back and things like that but structurally yeah it's it's a huge uh it there's a huge relationship between quality of life and and how your built environment looks yeah yeah your example like section eight housing it's perfect like perfect example of like you have the section eight housing it's typically poor people if they do make it out the first thing

they do is leave and not i think the one the most powerful thing you said with that example is like Like you don't, you don't, you, you leave and you take your example of like picking yourself up from your bootstraps and your connections. Cause that's what like mobility is all about. Connections, meeting people, meeting you guys, right? Like who knows what combustible collisions come from that. And that's really what, you know, people with better means, like they have more access to people.

And for those kinds of random moments of serendipity to happen, that suddenly land the job. If you're isolated in suburbia without a car and you're poor, how are you going to like, you know, the internet changed a lot of things, which is great, but still, you know um yeah makes it tough um i mean you mentioned the the science stuff of how we feel you know based on the architecture and there you had a book out and sussman's book i forget what it's called cognitive architecture or something i mean basically it's you know these humanist cities from the renaissance um that they really were trying to embody kind of these higher ideals of humanity in the city you know is really thinking about the city as a piece of art

and they kind of came to that conclusion from a non-rational way of thinking but now we're actually proving the exact same thing with science like actual science is showing us that the chemicals released in our brains and we see and experience certain things are profoundly different based on what we're looking at and people want to say there's not such things as real beauty in the world okay i get that there are subjective natures to beauty of course there are it's both objective and subjective but man 90% of people agree what a beautiful woman is 90% of people agree what a beautiful neighborhood is they might not want to live there right they might be like I love this I love being here I don't want to live it's not my favorite style

but like people generally agree about what is actually beautiful and life-giving and then those things are actually good for us and healthy for us and that's kind of what I mean by that people are complex and i think we're probably going to learn a lot more about how our like over the next 50 years about how our environment in our day-to-day lives really does affect us um in our and not just our emotions but kind of like even at a deeper level you could say like even spiritually or something like that um that's what i think don't you guys think it's funny that um uh you know proponents of modernism and post-modernism like they can't help but tacitly acknowledge what you're saying by just if you look at their advertising it's always like

oh this lush forest and then you know the house emerges and you know it's always like they they just or like oh then you see like a classical house in the reflection all of a sudden right it's like you know they they know that this is what people love is like that sense of nature and connection but like and but they're trying to sell you a cardboard box so they have to like find a way to spruce it up a bit here's your glass cube in a beautiful forest don't look at the view right which i want you to buy it the forest is what it's about it's like wait a minute right yes i'm a modern architect and i built that but that's not what's important here so are you sure i'm pretty sure this is what you're trying to do if you have to explain it you probably didn't

build great architecture yeah and you know back to like what uh austin was saying yes so when they when they're measuring people's emotions when they look at the buildings and stuff like they have eye tracking movements and um that's like the biggest tool that ann sussman and johnson hollander and uh there's another report i read um it was about the same thing but a different granularity or different distances and granularity of the uh the ornamentation of buildings and stuff how it quite literally affects your brain and what you look at subconsciously right so when you see beautiful arches and all this stuff you know your eye looks at it and if there's ornamentation your eye looks at it even if it's just for like a split second right your brain absorbs that information

and you are essentially pleased with what you see whereas if you look at modernist design and construction your brain quite literally just ignores it so in the eye tracking that it's not there's no focus points it's just people see it but they don't see certain things they don't see the arch or they don't see the ornamentation or you know they don't see the ornamentation on the door when they're 10 feet away right so when we when we talk about places humans you know basically evolved to see certain things at certain distances right so when you are in let's say an old european square the distance is typically i think it's uh it's like 21 meters so that's about the distance that you can see um some the whites of somebody's eyes

So you can tell whether or not they're looking at you. Right. So if you're in the social space and you don't know whether or not somebody is intent on being social with you. Right. So if you know, if you meet eyes across the room, that's usually a manner of engagement. Right. That you would meet up and discuss or talk or whatever. So, you know, the human environment is way too complex when interacting with each other to have the built environment or even homes or places where it's designed to be the opposite, right? There was something on Twitter the other day where people were talking about the width of roads and then the mandatory setbacks for like the front of the house. and the idea was that the distance from one person's front door to another person's front door across the street was over a hundred feet or it was about a hundred feet and that totally negates the idea of like well you know if you're thinking that i want to see my neighbor or something you know the 21 meters to notice what they're looking at well they're just too far away so you you end up in an environment where you you know you can't see your neighbors they're

They're too far away to even look at to begin an interaction. And this is something that Austin talked about last night. When you build a subdivision and you have a detached sidewalk, it's not like, let's go for a walk around the neighborhood. It's like, okay, I guess we're going for a walk around the neighborhood. It's a manner of just getting outside and being essentially corralled. And it's not a humanist environment where you can go outside and interact with people. um uh jane uh i just forgot her name death and life of cities jane jacobs jane jacobs wrote about um uh what's it called the sidewalk the sidewalk ballet where people essentially have interactions

with each other that are totally unplanned they're serendipitous and you know what becomes of that so you know we live in an environment that's been stripped of that essentially by decree um and it's not you know there's not some central planning authority in washington dc right it's your local your local jurisdiction that that does that so um you know i got a little off on a tangent but there there is certainly an emotional reaction to your built environment and that that emotional reaction evokes essentially nothing in the way that we live And that's partially why, you know, I think, you know, depression and all these things are so high in these neighborhoods because there's nothing to engage in, right? When you're by yourself or you're not able to engage with other people because it's literally designed to separate you.

Yeah, it feels like outside of these circles, most people don't recognize this as a problem, right? Like to think the solution to depression, alcohol, like all these addictions and drug abuse today is like therapy, a pill or something else. It's not like, oh, why don't we go look at our physical environment, how it's affecting us? Maybe we change that and we'll begin to push these things. It's the boiling frog syndrome, right? And I feel like Austrian economists would really hear all this and be like, yeah, this is the result of interventionism, where the more governments intervene, the more problems are created, which beget even more interventions, which then make other things worse. So there's all these knock on effects that eventually lead to this very sterile environment where, you know, maybe they're tempted to intervene even more and be like, yeah, why wouldn't we have like, you know, government planned 10 minute cities? And, you know, it's kind of like that's the height of hubris, right, that they think they can solve it, whereas what we really need is hands off and, like, ease off on these zoning requirements, ease off on a lot of these things so that capital can start doing its work.

And the market can just experiment with how do we even fix this? I wouldn't know. I wouldn't have some grand plan to fix Austin or any other city. It's like the solution has to come from the bottom up. That's my big problem with Austin. it's not a good walking city my whole life i've lived to walk in cities where it's philadelphia chicago or new york and like here just living two miles away two and a half miles away i can't walk here because there's too many like large roads even a place like bastrop it's like like a

wonderful little town it's beautiful i think it has the most um uh old buildings of any town in texas um but like they have that road that's just like going right through it all that traffic is going just straight through it and um good old-fashioned strode just ruining stroding yeah what is that mixing uh street and road yeah quick break here freaks this rip is brought to you by gradually then suddenly a framework for understanding bitcoin is money by parker lewis i wrote the forward to the book i'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero to one primer if you're looking for a logical explanation of why bitcoin obsoletes all other money buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends, go to the safe house.com slash gradually. That's

the safe house.com safe spelled S A I F the safe house.com slash gradually use the promo code TFTC for $5 off a checkout. Buy it now freaks. The price of Bitcoin is going up. You need to understand it. This is the best zero to one primer back to the show. It's funny. You mentioned like you don't notice the ugly architecture. I mean, what's going on in the neighborhood I live in here in austin is like they're knocking down a bunch of the old ranchers and building these square boxes the i think people say they're like california design modernist disgusting things my wife hates them we take walks to the playground around the neighborhood all the time and she's like every time we walk by like all these new houses coming up she's like these are hideous i

can't believe anybody would buy this and we we rent a rancher that was built in the 60s and it's it was built in a modular fashion it's actually pretty cool it was a rancher and then they built in addition for like a second floor loft that we have a guest room up there but you can see in that old design they made it in a modular way and you can tell the design of the house was in such a way that was uh conducive for the environment here with the heat like we have like natural shade and things like that to naturally cool the house and it's little design aspects like that that i don't think are even thought about with these huge square boxes no just buy a bigger air conditioner My God, like all the clamoring about more products, which is like, it's like, isn't it like helplessness, like on display where it's like, you know, they're like clamoring for the UN or whatever to fix climate change.

Whereas like, yes, if the temperature goes up, you can actually build in response to that. Like, look at how people live in Iran. Look at how people have lived for hundreds and thousands of years in like very high heat environments. There's perfect solutions for that, you know, but, but it has to, you know, it takes a more patient approach, these things. Austin, do you guys build with temperature in mind, local climate? Yeah, in terms of insulation and things like that, we do. But, like, from temperature-wise, yeah, like, I'm not that concerned about it. I'm like, hey, can we just solve clean energy?

You know, why are we putting all of it on the building to be energy efficient? Like, that's, we, I think it's because it feels like people can control it, and it's frankly coming down from code officials. But, like, it's so cultural now. Like, when someone walks into our house, they'll ask, like, two main questions. they'll say where do the mechanicals go and what's the r value because people have been programmed what's the r value insulation like kind of the insulative capacity and sometimes they might say r value because they kind of like no it's a little bit fancier word but it's basically

saying what's the insulation and how energy efficient is it because we program people to be like that is the most important thing about the house how energy efficient is it and it's not that i don't care about energy efficiency it's just about down here i'm about creating the best possible health and that's going to be context and beauty and the health of the materials and the durability of the materials and yes the energy efficiency but by the way energy efficiency can also work in direct inverse relationship to indoor air quality because in the old days you know we had these uh i mean i live in a hundred year old house in oklahoma city it's these old two by fours with old one by twelve on a diagonal for the kind of the sheathing and then a brick

veneer on the outside and the inside it's called lath and plaster these little strips of wood and then plaster over it and you know when i moved in that house i was going man this is 100 years old and I feel like this house could go another 100 years. It needs some help, but it could go another 100 years. I've been kind of crapping on, you know, wood framing. What's the difference here? And then I also was doing some historic remodels and started to really understand even the difference

between what we were doing just 100 years ago, even though they weren't like structural masonry buildings like what I'm doing now. But they were old growth 2x4s. They were old growth 1x12s. I mean, the rings on them are just, you know, unbelievable versus today. They're like 7 to 10 year old trees,

which are highly prone to rot, highly prone to termites. Then, instead of 1x12s, we're putting plywood, which was relying on glues, which are going to degrade over time. Then we started insulating them. We realized energy efficiency is a big deal. So we started insulating those cavities. But then we realized, oh, my gosh, that's causing major problems because our house isn't really airtight or watertight. So water was getting in. The insulation was trapping it.

So then we started obsessing about enclosing the house completely so that basically turning it into a refrigerator, which I actually understand that does make sense to actually need to do because you've got a different environment outside than a different environment inside. But the problem is we're using all these materials that are so prone to moisture and they're so vulnerable in a highly complex system. And so that's why I would talk about masonry is so much more forgiving because it can handle water a lot better than these other things. But that's part of the problem today is water is going to get inside your walls.

The question is when and does it do damage? and the problem is with how we build today is it does do damage and and it does have really bad health impacts for people and like people don't get it's new but i think in 30 years people are going to be obsessing over mold in the house and things like that there's going to be all sorts of codes about them we already tried it you know you mentioned dehumidifiers we're trying to put dehumidifiers and erv systems whole home filtration systems in because if indoor air quality can be five times worse than outdoor air quality in urban environments that's crazy and a lot of that's from the materials we're putting in our houses from the furniture and the you know all the stuff and

the bromides and the fire retardants and all sorts of stuff um but we just do this without any thought to human health you know so you're saying like we basically live in plastic bags with a few breathing holes yeah no yeah it's more like a giant chemistry set that's yeah yeah and and uh to what austin is saying is like when you're when you're building something you have to consider like where where's the water coming from where's it going to enter the house and how does it get out so when you use brick or these older better building materials you don't necessarily have to worry about that because it's more of a natural defense against that you don't want to build you know an airtight brick house necessarily but you know you may have to now that's definitely not the

case with like a two by four if you're doing sticks right you have to you have to seal the house you have to make sure that there's not going to get any there's not going to there's not going to be any water that gets in there and if it gets in there is it going to get trapped because that's when you get mold that's when you get all these other problems um the i mean even on like jobs that we have now we have a special um a special consultant that reviews the plans for water to make sure that any any flat surface actually is sloped away from the building um they review all of the penetration details to make sure that like hey is there any special is there any water that's going to get in around the windows around the doors and then i have special inspections for

all of that stuff and this is just required by the insurance company because you know they're the ones that get sued and lose the money at the end of the day but you know when you when you go back to you know better building materials it's not necessarily as much of a problem i mean like your your brick your typical brick house is not like a chemistry set like a house today is you know you've got like you said all the things in the wood for flame retardants which is like almost pointless the whole idea is just to buy you know an extra 30 30 seconds to a minute of time for somebody to escape but then like even the stuff that's in the floors like the carpet or if you have like lvt the glue i mean there's so much glue in houses that people would be

absolutely blown away that they literally live in like, you know, huffing glue all day. Other than huffing glue, their house is held together by glue. You're like, holy cow. And this is serious. It's not just like, oh, I'm tired or something like that. Like we're talking about profound effects on people. How does 41% of Americans have diabetes or prediabetes? How are 80% of Americans overweight? And like, it's not because people are just, you know, bad people or something, that environment and the lifestyle is destroying people's lives. The amount of people with chronic disease in this country is skyrocketing. You cannot have a productive society.

If you walk around and just look at, like, kids in high school nowadays and their health conditions and stuff, it is so sad. And it's not their fault, you know. And then, of course, you've got people like, yeah, you've got people saying eat cereal for dinner, too. But you've got all sorts of problems there. And the other thing we don't talk about, you know, with all these glues, it's not just the people living in the house. Guess what? It's the people building the house, too.

Sawing those pieces of plywood, those formaldehydes and the glues and all this particle dust that you're breathing in. Yes, technically, OSHA says wear a mask all the time. No one does. I'm just going to be clear. We try to abide by all OSHA rules, to be clear. I just mean, like, if you go to job sites and residential areas, if someone's cutting a piece of plywood, look if they've got a mask on. They do not. And their hands are touching the things.

Our skin is highly, you know, porous material absorbing all this stuff. So we're destroying the people's lives that are building it, too. And, of course, you know, but we don't care about that either. I say we don't care about it. Most people, just the average consumer, doesn't know these things or think about these things. But as a culture and a society, as an industry, I think we should talk about all these things. Well, and then regular people who get an inkling of this stuff going on are like, well, that's capitalism for you. And so then they're like, we need the politician to fix it all.

I feel like that is a guy smoking a cigarette just like, oh, no. not this conversation again no it is that's another thing that's sad right we've been talking about a lot or i've been talking about with a lot of people we actually just had an economist on who worked at the fed under alan greenspan episode drops tomorrow but like that was a big thing like he's running for congress like with the stated goal to like convince people like it's not capitalism like we don't live in a capitalist society and we really anchored back to first principles of us not living in a capital societies we don't have free market for money which is the most important tool we use throughout the economy you can't have a capitalist society

if you have government controlled money like from that point on everything is centralized to an extent i love how malay explains it to the kids basically he's kind of like just look at these buildings like these new buildings are ugly they're built in in a system where the government is everywhere look at the older buildings they're amazing this was built in a time when free markets actually had a had some room to breathe you know so like and things were getting financed by people in and you know in the area that were doing things so they care because if you're off in a boardroom in new york or something managing a fund or a family fund or whatever it is you're just looking at spreadsheets to decide to decide where the next investment is going to go and you can be a great

person, like, right. Some of those people are not, but I mean, some of them can be great people, but you're still just making decisions strictly based on a spreadsheet, strictly based on numbers. You have, you don't care about Austin. You don't care about Oklahoma city. You just are looking at numbers and you think you can extract, you know, the most profit from this place. And then when you only have five to 10 year holds, there's no incentive for anyone to build it really well, because it's going to be gone. You're going to sell it. And that's why I love the old way of doing things is, I mean, just even 60 years ago, or 80 years ago, developers were building and holding on to them for a

long time, there was no exit strategy, and your incentives can immediately change. It's crazy, because in the world of real estate investment, the first questions are, like, how, how well built is this property going to be? Like, how happy are the people that are living in it going to be? It's like, what's the IRR? Yeah, like, what's my more? What's our in? What's our out? What's the IRR? Yeah. 10 years.

Are we doing 16%? Are we doing north of 15? Yeah, I don't want to look at it. Kelly, in the car, you were talking about the mobile homes. That was fascinating. We were talking about this at lunch. Yeah. And so the summary of the conversation was that my dad and I have done a couple tours of mobile home factories in Phoenix.

And we're looking around, and we're like, that looks a lot like the stuff that we build. The same quality, same material. Cabinets are nice. Countertops are probably a little bit different. maybe a different flooring but it's like you know overall in general the constructability of these things is pretty good and then you get further into it and these guys are like yeah if you want to upsize your sub floors have thicker things if you want to have a two by six exterior wall we do all that and you're like wait you do all this i thought this is just something that i do on site

you know it's just site built things that are the reason why site build is quote unquote nicer and better but it's just gotten to the point now where you know their technologies have improved because they have to respond to certain markets right they have different regulatory sets but for us it's like we're uh we're value engineering everything we possibly can to essentially have an affordable product on site and then these guys are over here like yeah i can do that for 40 cents on the dollar and it's just as good and you're like well this is a problem so i mean it's just something that we're having to look at you know you in economics we would call that the substitution effect right where um as prices increase people will look for

essentially inferior goods because they just can't afford the price increases um and wonder why there's not affordable housing yeah and and what it comes down to really i mean for for a lot of it is just you know the increase in the money supply causes generally an increase in prices across the board but if your incomes don't go up 40 to afford the cost of the house that went up 40 then you have to find an alternative so um you know these things aren't like your your grandpa's trailer and it's not like you know from trailer park boys but at the same time like you know with a few with a few changes to the countertops and the floorings and some of the fixtures in in this product this is completely indistinguishable from what i can build on site right and these guys

you know you order it a month in advance it takes them up to two weeks to build depending on what you get and they drop it off and put it on a foundation and or excuse me on on some stem walls or something like that they set it and then you have a house it's it's it's amazing you know from it's amazing from both ends like i said the technological increases and fulfilling a product that has to compete versus something that is site built and it's just totally beaten by regulations and costs and all of these things that just eat away at it and um it's it's it's sad to see but like once you see it you just it's completely understandable and it's like i guess you know maybe this is what we should be doing now because our value and what we do is providing shelter to

people. We, you know, we're developers and builders. We want to build and give people a place to live and get paid to do it. Like that's just what we want to do. So if I can't build it on site anymore and I have to do something with, you know, modular prefab housing or something like that, then it just is what it is. There's, there, there's no other way to solve the problem of you know however many people want shelter that can't afford it or can't get it based on you know the price so um it's a very interesting catch-22 where somebody you know we all want to have beautiful buildings and do beautiful things and build all this wonderful stuff but you know the reality of the incentives is that hey like unless you are going to do this out of your own

pocket or you have a group of people that are willing to sit on this property for 30 or 50 years and have that patient capital approach, then this is what you have to do, you know, to survive. The problem is, oh, go ahead. I was going to say it's soul crushing. The problem compounds because, you know, there's two points of that where you're responding, you're right. In the natural system, you have to provide housing because housing is even more and more badly needed because housing is getting more expensive. And so then, and I think the mobile home is actually a really kind of smart response in some ways to the system.

because it's like providing the best quality housing you possibly can within the working system. But once again, are you creating, in the end, great places that people are going to be using 200 years from now? No, of course not. But no one is today. You know, no one's really able to build those things. And there's two main problems with that.

One is, you know, is it Amos or Amos with the book Bitcoin? What is his name? Amos. Amos. So he talks about, you know, really the only physical limitation in the world is human labor. Yeah, human labor. And when you have to rebuild things every 50, 75, 100 years, you're just expending the same labor to do the same thing over and over again.

You're never freeing that up to do something better or higher. So you're kind of like stagnating as a society, just doing the same things over and never able to elevate beyond that. And then the second thing, we always complain about affordable housing. And, I mean, politicians are just like, where's the affordable housing? How dare you, Kelly, not build a quarter tower? How dare you? You're building brick houses. Those are only for rich people.

you know i mean we hear that a lot and um you know the reason well there's a lot of reasons but one of the reasons we don't have affordable housing we don't have enough housing and part of the reason we don't have enough housing is because all the current zoning and rules and regulations and all that but the second reason is because we don't build anything that lasts so it's a supply and demand issue we don't have housing we don't have enough housing because there's not enough supply and when you can't add to the actual supply it's very difficult to add to the supply i mean you're just going to be in a perpetual state of problem affordable housing is old housing you have a quite literally disintegrating supply because yeah it's melting away i mean that's why

safedine says like he says real estate is a coin because it literally melts away the value melts away and and the powers that be try to sell you on it because it's an extension of the fiat system because all that mortgage money is like is basically coming from from them uh being pushed into into real estate and and so people are using have been using real estate as a monetary substitute to like for their savings it's like you know fiat money cash money is one that melts away the fastest then you have bonds that melt away a little slower and then real estate used to kind of be the best one the best government issued coin so to speak and and like you know hearing kelly's stories like well these basically we're going to slum standards so this idea of like the

american dream of like you get to own your own home it's like no no it's you get to own your own shack maybe if you can make payments on your 10% mortgage you know so like that like dream is starting to crumble and I think that we have to question like the idea like is it really like what is the what are you weighing what what is the the trade-off nowadays if you keep on pushing that narrative that everyone has to own their own home means at the expense of literally owning more bitcoin right i mean that's the trade-off like are you going to have more bitcoin or more more equity in in your shack and so to me that that is is gone out the window like it's just no question that it's clearly better to own hard money and bide your time and eventually maybe buy your house

in cash you know if you want to um but yeah it's it's people don't know their history either and that like historically home ownership wasn't as ubiquitous not because everyone was poor and we lived in a feudal society but because people had hard money and you would rather save in hard money and then there was a specialized small part of the economy who would specialize in building homes stewarding it for the next generation maybe passing it on within the family um and and and they have a massive incentive to build high quality homes anyway and rent but um but yeah real estate really has become a shit coin i'm afraid but don't worry it all adds to gdp everything's that's what's interesting

it's like we have to build it all the GDP goes up we're like I grew up 2% this year doing the same crap we you know over and over and over again

everybody's working full employment yeah everybody's working to repair the house that just fell apart that they just good job

we're winning we're winning the game well I mean everybody's working in the Soviet Union I mean but it's like it's also

creating this competency crisis as well you were mentioning last night it's hard for you guys to get bricks so hard Everything about, yeah, bricks, trades, all that.

Just everything is starting to, one, everything's starting to centralize. Like brick, local family-owned brick practices and stuff are getting bought up by the big companies. Private equity is coming in and buying up. Things like landscaping companies, and I know this isn't real estate, but health care clinics and things like that. It's a new big thing. Kind of like, do we all want a bunch of private equity owning our health care clinics? Because they saw, I don't know what they're seeing, but they're clearly seeing a profit opportunity. Some of that can be good with upgraded systems and all that.

Like, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there can be some benefits, but my bet is going to be health care goes down. Yeah. Yeah. And we already spend, this is crazy, 20% of our GDP, 20% of our GDP on health care in this country. The most of any country in the entire world. And we have the most, some of the most unhealthy people in the entire world. Once again, how do you have a productive society when 20% of your GDP goes to health care? And most of that's in the last couple of years of life or treating preventable chronic diseases. profoundly irresponsible and like those private equity bros they're not thinking about like oh let's increase

the quality of health care what's the IRR you know because that's not good for profits if we actually take care of people we lose money and it's like leading to the decay of the nuclear family going down the two

scenarios of day in life and brutalist suburbia versus like a walkable city like i one of the things that really resonated with me was like grandma like going to pick up grandma like that's something in america that really dismays me and actually pisses me off particularly right now because my grandmother was living with my mom um for about a year and then she just moved it's like she decided herself to move like away it's like a 65 and over community it's like an hour away from my mom's house i was like what the fuck like and she made that my mom

didn't want her to leave but she decided on her own but the point being the culture in america is such where it's like at the end of life the people that raised us that gave us the lives that we have today we're just like all right go in this home the moment they can't drive yeah it's you know and the number of people over 80 years old or something like with the boomers aging i get everyone wants cars if you can't drive a car or by the way do we want people that are 80 years old driving 70 miles an hour frankly like I've got kids in my car you know what I mean um we're over 40 you know there's over 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the U.S. and that's not including you know injuries and things like that or the cost of it um yeah I think we're really uh I think people

that age are going to care a lot less about cars when when they can't drive anymore you know they're going to wish they had different options for living yeah and it comes back to like not only quality of life but like sound economic decisions it's like when you have a big when you have a good nuclear family and then you have a very strong extended family in terms of aunts uncles cousins in-laws whatever it may be like that's one of the biggest problems of the fiat world right now that suburbia day in the life that you described yesterday it's likely two parents going to work to create two incomes just to survive and to assist then on top of that they're paying daycare and schooling cost and if you have these walkable cities where you have strong families and strong

towns like the older the older generations end up taking care of the grandkids it's the way it's been for millennia the way it should be but we've completely gotten away from that here it's funny to or funny like kind of worrisome to drive around in the hill country here and just see like how um the distances that people have to like travel to maintain their lifestyle and you of like i kind of look at i remember like just looking at some development and yeah it all has water it has electricity it has uh internet but then it's like how much i guess monetary energy is needed to keep the lights on in those kind of areas and what if we go to like an inflationary depression like honestly i think a lot of the lights are going to go out and a lot of these

suburban areas are just gonna sit and decay uh i remember visiting spain in 2011 because they had a crazy real estate boom in 2006 the numbers were just insane i think they were like consuming 20 or 30 percent of the world's concrete you know at the same time they had like workers from latin america pouring in a crazy building boom you could basically build a house with like a thousand dollars down like you could just you know they were just anybody was getting loans and so then then they had the bust and uh and driving around there i i literally saw that like just completed developments that you you could tell were just falling apart were empty because they were too remote like the the the the the it's it's literally the the the fact that socialism

can't calculate the fact that that you um misallocate resources during a credit bubble like i i think we haven't seen that play out like that's going to happen in the next 20 30 years in the u.s like a lot of these developments aren't going to be long-term sustainable which is funny because that's uh counter to what the mainstream narrative is is like when this hype when this inflationary crisis comes you want to get out of the cities but it's like they may have i have the opposite kind of thing because we already had the the white flight you know in the 60s 70s 80s 90s out to the suburbs the thing is the suburbs are now built out you can only go so far out you know before life gets kind of more more people one of my friends says is the more people that kind of

like come to an urban environment the better it gets the more people to go to a suburban environment the worse it gets sometimes because traffic gets so bad and all that um that's kind of my theory is that a lot of these kind of stuff built in the past 40 years especially the stuff built in about the last 20 these kind of lower end subdivisions isolated subdivisions those will be the new kind of slums because you are not incentivized one the houses are cheap two they're actually people can't actually afford them even though they can afford to buy them they can't afford to maintain them And those are very expensive to maintain. Three, they're not incentivized to maintain them because if they do spend, I don't know, $20,000 to do something in their house,

if their neighbors didn't do it, which they probably didn't, they're never going to get their money out of it. So if you're smart, you actually don't maintain your house and you just sell it before the fact. Because if you maintain your house, you're going to lose money when you sell it. Then once that starts happening, it's a little bit of degrading. The people with options are going to move out. People with fewer options are going to move in with fewer resources. as the house degrades, property taxes start going down, appraisals start going down, the infrastructure starts crumbling that the private developer put in,

and then the city takes over, but the property taxes don't actually cover it. That starts degrading, and then basically no one wants to live there, and it becomes kind of the Section 8 housing thing where the only people that live there are the people that don't have choices. And then they're isolated without work, without schools, without hospitals, without doctors and services, and maybe self-driving cars and all that can help these things. And once again, I sound really apocalyptic about that. The thing is, I think people are amazingly resilient, too.

And so these things will actually lead to opportunities to build something new for communities to bond together, to take care of each other. So it's not like one all hopeless, but it's just like what we do matters. And I feel like there's just so much of the world is just like, let's just do shit. Let's just do shit. And it's just all going to turn out great. It's like, no, this actually affects people in profound ways. It's like just this is the purpose of life, you know, like is to build a better world. And, you know, we just don't talk about that.

We just talk about the spreadsheets. Well, awesome. Nobody's going to bond together and build something. You need the government to build the roads. Of course. Actually, I was speaking of government. Bastrop, which is that town I was mentioning, a historic town, they have like a 30-year plan. So you can like download it online.

And it's kind of like how they're going to grow the city responsibly. And literally what you're talking about, totally confirmed by the government, they're basically saying it's not sustainable to have sprawl. So basically they're limiting the lot sizes and they're limiting how much sprawl will be allowed over time, which I think is smart. And it's going to make it a lot more sustainable than towns that don't do that and then end up with a wasteland, basically. that they can't afford to render the services like i mean all these things cost money like picking up a lot of money sewer lines i mean gosh expensive that yeah and well and that's that's something that uh strong towns when chuck put it out there you know when i had found it i was like you know oh wow like i i pay for all of this infrastructure to go in um in in arizona you

have hoas that are responsible for private sewer lines private water lines all this other stuff and you know theoretically the math works that whoever lives there is going to pay to replace the infrastructure and that may have sounded good and worked like you know 30 30 years ago 20 years ago even but now we're at a point where you know if m2 is increasing generally at like eight percent a year you know are people able to afford to replace the water and sewer now um you know and and like what austin was saying if if it is publicly maintained there's absolutely no way the math works not not even by like a long shot you'd have to increase property taxes by like a multiple of five just to pay for stuff today not tomorrow not in the

future not any of that so um uh like i'm saying again times five so you'd have to you'd have to Increase the essentially property taxes just for the portion of infrastructure, not for like public schools and all this stuff. It'd have to be like a multiple of five. In some cases, it depends on the city because every municipality does differently. It could be an entire order of magnitude more. So, you know, there is no ability for, especially governments, to be able to do the math to maintain or replace what already exists. But Kelly, I'm locked into my 3% mortgage for 30 years. Like, I'm going to be fine, right?

You're going to be locked into a 100-year mortgage with the sewer department at this rate. Yeah, you know, what was that? It was in Mississippi. This was two or three years ago. Oh, the water pipelines? Yeah, water pipelines. Like, the whole city. I mean, I think it was one of the big cities in Mississippi.

I can't remember. I mean, they were just, like, out of water for, it wasn't just a week. Months. It was, like, months. Yeah. And they were, like, and I mean, I know Mississippi is a poor state and all that, but I think there's a lot of things like that coming as our aging infrastructure happens. and there's just not money. We're just not used to that, of being told no, like there's not money.

We're like, what do you mean there's not money? Can't we just like print it? Can't we just borrow it? Local municipalities can't do that, you know, and I think you're going to see more of that. And something to keep in mind along with all of this is that a lot of the sewer and water infrastructure in municipalities is not paid for by those municipalities. They get federal grants for those wow so like in in the situation mississippi if i'm not mistaken it's so bad yeah i know this is i swear this is not a doomer this is not a zoomer pod freaks but um and i this go harks back to the conversation tour and i had you know the first time we talked he said he was absolutely horrified about some of the stuff i was saying i was like i'm not trying

to scare you i'm just telling you like the facts ma'am you know like that's it and um so those all the infrastructure is originally paid for by you know federal grant and then like in the situation with mississippi it ended up being like a i think it was like a 45 or 50 million dollar repair that had to be done because they couldn't even exist or excuse me they couldn't afford to maintain the existing infrastructure that they had at a fraction of that cost so that's why it became such a hubbub if i recall correctly that the the the expense to repair the literal one section of the plant was so expensive that they just they that it was so expensive to maintain that they just couldn't even do it so um you know it just adds the layer of complexity to an existing

situation where all of this stuff can only be afforded by our ability to you know print money to have debt to afford a certain level of debt well that's i mean i've got a few thoughts here like i know you touched on it last night and it's probably not the solution but it seems like we need some form of creative destruction where we recognize the sprawl is bad and it's like let's consolidate like let's get back into the hole figuratively like run back and like consolidate to make sure that we don't have this large maintenance problem get worse and the other thing like we've been shouting out chuck a lot but i think that book is one of the most important books that's been written uh in the last couple decades but like really to attack the problem

from a ground up perspective is like internalizing people focus on revenue per square foot and that's how you're actually going to be able to maintain all this infrastructure is if you like literally look at the square footage of the properties within your municipality focus on revenue per square foot then you can begin to like climb back and solve these problems yeah that would be real capitalism you know where you're like saying hey you live in this area here's the cost of the infrastructure in that area and here's how much you have to pay to cover the infrastructure in that area and if we did that everywhere we would be so much better people pay for what they're using and the way they're but i don't have a problem if you can afford suburbia great yeah

but we're i'm just against subsidizing it no it goes back to like you were you were describing last night with the drive-thru for the coffee yeah like they've literally constructed it where it's like we don't even want people to come in here it's just a drive-thru it's too slow yeah and that's what we've built one it's it's it's an 800 square foot box and 400 of it is the freezer wow it was like i think about my parents in uh in havertown like uh my dad's since passed but they had this coffee shop like on darby road like our local like uh main road but it was walkable and it's probably 300 square foot if that but it was a community place they would do artwork on uh the window they had outdoor seating and it's like a place where where you

were describing the drive-through is completely uh take out the ability for these serendipitous interactions where i've seen it with my parents coffee shop like it's a community meeting space where people come grab coffee chat up to baristas chat up the other patron sit outside maybe go to yoga down the street before after like that and where you live temporarily in philadelphia where i'm from it's a very strong community um which i'm proud of um but it's because of these small businesses um and i gave my dad strong towns a couple years ago and he was like holy shit revenue per square foot and like he applied that to what he was doing at the coffee shop and the community thing is so important what you're talking about because i realize i think most people in this

country including myself kind of had a confused idea of what the what community means because you see a lot of stuff marketed as community like everything's marketed as community at this point every shitty suburban subdivision is marketed as luxury and community and whatever you know pine creek forest and there's no pines or creeks or forests but you know i think community we try to make it once again about the big things where it's like maybe there's like two hoa events a year you know and i'm not against those those can be great additive things we actually do this in our neighborhood i live in an old historic neighborhood it's it's a great little neighborhood but it's still kind of like 7 000 square foot lots very uh it should be kind of suburban actually um but

i know my neighbors directly next to me and we check take out the trash grab the mail whatever and have nice little relationships but then the HOA you know throws two year two events a year or something and I go and I don't remember you know I'm like oh what's your name again you know like you're just having the same conversation over because you don't have any of the small touches and it's always kind of awkward you don't remember people's names and so we think it's like community isn't about being best friends with everyone you we have so small capacity for like friendship once you have like family and work and kind of your basics it's like let me get together with my friends you know once twice three times a month maybe and then outside of that what you

need to have an actual community which is really I think maybe a better term is neighborly connections because it is that like five second 30 second 60 second five minute interaction that actually just creates little bonds over time and there's this book called oversubscribed it's a marketing book But he uses this analogy. He calls it the 7-11-4 rule. And I can't remember the exact specifics of it, but he says in today's economy, for people to make an expensive purchasing choice, they need to spend seven hours over 11 separate interactions in four different locations before they will buy from you. for say so say build buying a house for me they need seven hours of interactions over 11 different instances and four different locations and locations could be a newsletter a podcast in person an event open house whatever and you can apply this to anything but that kind of blew my mind because i was like if that's what people need to make a purchasing choice what do people need

in terms of the amount of touches to feel a sense of belonging in the community you know what i mean and once again the different contexts of seeing someone at the park at the coffee shop running into someone, it's not a big deal. And that actually allows you to have connections with people you completely disagree with. Your friends, you probably want to share a lot of values. The people I want to invite into my home, that's a very intimate thing. If I want to make plans to go to dinner with you, that's a pretty intimate thing. But just to be able to like, hey, someone could be opposite of me, but we can play in the park together. Our kids can play. We can on the playground or play a game of spike ball or volleyball or something like that. Or who knows

what it is, see each other at the coffee shop. There's just a million things to create those bonds yeah we've uh we've been doing this more we i was proud last night we were like juxtaposing what schools used to be to what they are now like our oldest he's four and he's going to to school and it's at like a schoolhouse and that's where we have these small interactions drop off and then we actually started going to church at the school just because we wanted to build more within that community and it has like it feels more comfortable drop off now you see somebody at church you say what's up it's cool drop off and it is that the smaller feels so different we're like here in the elevator even here in this beautiful building like that's one

thing i always try to do is like say what's up to people in the elevator but you can tell like most people are like in the corner yeah you stopped testing it yeah don't talk don't talk please don't talk what also was talking about reminded me that um after the pandemic when i went back to to belgium to uh to my hometown i um it was like sunday morning i went to get um pastries for uh for the family at the bakery that the neighborhood bakery that you know i'd always go to growing up and um the the lady you know selling the the bread and pastries was the same lady that had been working there for 20 years and so it had been like 10 years that we had you know talked again and um and uh we had never ever talked before we always had those like little

tiny interactions over a span of 10 years what i would like go there and like she trusted me enough to like tell her about her like you know the divorce and how hard it was and like it was like it was pretty amazing you know how like i think you're totally right it like all this it adds up and it builds so much trust even if it doesn't you know when when you're in it and when you're used to it it might not feel like much but when you like start living without it it really is very different it's the disintegration of the social fabric yeah it really is we didn't i didn't understand this that like good manners and things like i don't mean like yes ma'am yes sir all the same just saying hi thank you appreciate it please holding the door holding the door are

actually little moments to just like of humanity with each other that create these small connections of like i see you um and and it's not just about me and my own little head uh and those that's actually part of the glue that holds society together and i mean there's like that thing of if if you tell someone uh uh i don't call someone ugly how many like compliments it takes to kind of like make up for them emotionally and it's like seven or ten i can't remember what it is but like the amount of positive interactions to overcome a negative interaction and you're always going to have negative interactions but you need the possibility to have lots of positive interactions and we've completely taken that away because it's just once again isolation from home

isolation a car isolation to work you know um and you don't have the opportunities for those to unfold organically when you get to work you can sit in a cube yeah right right isolated in a cube all day yeah i mean at home in the car at work yeah we need to get away from this it's uh it's soul-sucking now again i'm thinking back to my mom my mom now uh she works for like a legal farm and she got an email last week like uh we don't want you listening to podcasts in your cube like you need to be attentive and i was like holy fuck like i'm gonna get you out of there mom don't worry but it's like go ahead i was gonna say i think like what we're estimating just based on what we're doing and of course market by market but i think it's going to cost us probably between

50 to 80 million per block to really rebuild a block you know which is really generally 400 400 feet by 400 feet maybe it's a couple acres or something but that's it but we can create so much density there you know what I mean

but that's like what it is like when we're talking about because real estate is an expensive expensive thing you know but like

it's like basically 60 million dollars to 70 million dollars a block for us to kind of like rebuild and create village by village by village

by village so like 10 bitcoin per block sounds doable well to this point do you think bitcoin demonetizing real estate as a store of value

can actually accelerate the rebuilding of more beautiful architecture absolutely what was the question bitcoin basically taking the monetary premium that exists in real estate now people realizing like this isn't a good store of value like bitcoin's a better store of value the the word that keeps coming back there's a belgian economist and he wrote this book called gigantism and um which i think is such an interesting word because he's talking about like the just an endless sprawl of bureaucracy and those kind of things but but it's such a

good word i think to to to point at those things that a lot of people call capitalism but actually what it is is like you know the fiat system it like messes up the endocrine system of the economy and it leads to like hyper growth in in particular areas and so we're growing these extra limbs that like are basically not functional and and and and so what happens once you have like a you know ultimately we'll have like a corralito like they had in 2001 in argentina where like the banks just closed down and like there's a massive devaluation and this big shock and and what happens then is the capital retreats and i think real estate it'll that'll reveal that real estate actually is very heterogeneous like heterogeneous in the sense that not every

house is the same not every neighborhood is the same what you saw happen in in 2001 argentina was prices all across the country went down massively except buenos aires only had a dip of 20 that's kind of crazy if you think about it right i mean that and and that because that is actually a healthy city the the the backbone of which was constructed in under hard money under free markets and so i think that'll that'll happen in the u.s and europe like once we have those shocks monetary shocks it's kind of like in a way the the the the the excess hormone gets like adjusted and it gets normalized and of course the the body needs time to adjust to this new situation but it is long term what needs to happen to regain economic health i do think you know

real estate isn't just like a store of value like bitcoin is i mean right now because bitcoin is on the rise it's honestly it's not just a store of value it's also a speculative you know investment essentially in the long run the goal isn't really for bitcoin to be that right because it the part of it is to stay or at least my understanding to stabilize and real estate where that comes in after you well now or whatever but i mean is real estate is not just a store of value it is a highly cash flowing, you know, store of value, you could say it's store of value, plus cash flow that's paying you, you know, a substantial dividend every year to keep you let you accumulate another pile of money to go, you know, that you might want to store in Bitcoin, and then go do something

else. And so I think these are two, you know, things that work symbiotically. But also, I would say it's a way to leave a legacy. Oh, you know, like, imagine like, you know you're you're 60 years old you're a bitcoin like build it like a a brick church for your community or something like what a legacy you know it's just uh those kind of things as kelly said last night don't let your memes be dreams don't let your memes be dreams the citadel starts in your backyard um yeah i mean it's uh it's a pretty it's a pretty wild experiment i do think that um the the monetary premium is slowly being siphoned especially you know by people such as you and i or whoever that's renting and is not you know aping into a house on their w2

right so you know the idea is that if i'm if i'm going to store the value i've created and what i've been paid in in bitcoin you know versus the traditional model of hey i need to buy a house so that i build equity so that you know in 10 years or whatever i can trade up or i can sell and go downsize or you know like a lot of the boomers are trying to sell and downsize but the problem is they have nobody to sell to so um i do think it'll get siphoned over time and we were talking last night with a group at dinner that you know like what what what is the actual value of real estate if you had to price it today you know if you or you know if you had to price it today on a bitcoin standard like what is it what is it really is it the cash flowing element that

it's worth is it the value of you know building a church in the neighborhood that's going to last for you know 500 years or whatever how do you do that and i think the answer is that you can't you can't do that today the way that we have money and that if you have a hard and sound money then you can make those calculations because you have something that will protect you know your purchasing power over a very long period of time um i think uh i think was it last night somebody was talking about the when you build a cathedral if you have money over 100 years that if it stays Or was that at dinner? It might have been at dinner.

I think it was, Bitstein was talking about it, that if you wanted to build a cathedral, it would take you 100 plus years. And that if you used gold, you know, at the time, you could afford to do that because your purchasing power was essentially protected over that period of time. But if you had to do that where inflation was 2%, you'd make it 50 years. So you couldn't even afford to build the thing. and if you apply that to how we build and plan our built environment today it's not about like

you know even building a freeway yeah i i expect it's going to be there 100 years but i don't build it so that it lasts 100 years you know i don't it's a common joke in every city you go to that the freeway is still always under construction you know it's never finished it's like well that's because the way that it's built it can never be finished it always has to be you know repaired sections replaced expanded um the utilities under it fixed like there's all of these things that have to happen so it's very difficult to make you know the long-term calculations when you know your money doesn't even last the long term yeah i think we discussed this the first time he came on the show kelly but uh in chic when i was living in chicago like that was the most annoying thing

was like spring and summer it was impossible to drive in the city because there was so much construction because they had to redo the roads after it snowed and you salted and you'd um plowed the roads it would all get um fucked up and uh eventually became known that like it was on purpose it was just essentially this jobs program where the city would use like mid-grade gravel to repave the road every every year so that it would inevitably get messed up in the winter during the snow time so that they'd have construction jobs in this the spring and summer it's like redo it it's like that very perverse GDP yes exactly and it's like no if you used a high-grade cement or gravel to do this you could construct it away maybe you have to repair it every 10 years not

every every spring yeah I mean the Romans figured out how to build roads okay people 2,000 years ago figured out how to build roads that can last longer than what we built today I mean come on Yeah. You go to Philadelphia, the Cobble Street roads that were built in the 1700s are still there. The Dutch still do it. I mean, I see pictures. Yeah, I grew up on a cobblestone street and actually the city wanted to replace the whole thing with just tarmac. And we organized a protest. and only because the the there was a historic building like was one commission able to kind of secure a part of the street to remain in cobblestone that it was like historically

authentic looking but yeah it's it's sad you know it's a it's a um it's just assuming that there's always going to be money to maintain this this new way of doing things which is like looks simpler on paper but in the long run the costs are far higher you know and also like the natural effect of cobblestones like cars do slow down when they drive on cobblestones and you brought this up last night but this goes again the fiat system is perturbed like the big meme in the world right now whether it's related to climate or building a house is like sustainability and they use things like lead uh lead certifications and like all this insulation stuff to be like all right if you don't hit the certification of this installation you're not

sustainable which is the exact opposite because it is not sustainable from a physical standpoint or economically over the course of 30 years. And like what you're building is way more sustainable. Like just objectively. Yes. Like extending the time horizon of sustainability. Like people think again in quarters years, maybe a decade and people,

people were that electric cars are going to make the world sustainable. Do you have any idea how many resources electric car takes? I'm not saying it's not better than a combustion engine. I'm not an expert. Also, pickups that weigh twice as much as old pickups that can go zero to 60 in three seconds, that sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? No, and then sustainable, from a capital perspective,

you can make a very strong argument that the opportunity cost of time capital would increase massively under an EV fleet because of the time it takes to charge the car. Maintainability is going to be a big issue. Imagine the lines to charge your car when we get this out. And the draw on the electricity grid, which we can't actually support yeah the tire i've learned this one that uh when we talk about

you know air quality and yes it doesn't have the combustion engine and stuff like that and those emissions but a huge part of air quality in cities is is the dust kicked up the silica dust kicked up off highways and then also the tire wear of all this rubber you know in the air and then there's some articles that are arguing about whether electric cars have more of that because they're heavier and i don't really care but just saying like even taking away the combustion emissions you're still making the air really unhealthy in your cities by focusing only as cars and you know i'm not against cars at all it's more just car light you know like other means of getting around where you shouldn't have to have a car to do anything you know i think the dutch model is

pretty awesome actually you know i'm pretty obsessed with dutch cities um right because i think they've really they're not like ultra dense like even a paris or something that's all these big apartment buildings it's actually more row home based and a little bit less dense i think it's like 20 average like 20 20 units to an acre or stuff but they still have they've got cars but they've got lots and lots of bike lanes but they're protected bike lanes and they teach kids to ride bikes when they're like three or four years old or something which you think about the independence and the health and all those things right from that yeah i mean i do feel some compassion for like the central planners to just kind of you know pile them together but

Um, because I'm just thinking about real, uh, I was reading that, uh, Robert Caro book, the first, uh, part of the, the LBJ biography where he talks about, you know, um, uh, Lyndon Johnson growing up here in the hill country, like just in the 1920s. And he literally, this is a hundred years ago, he, he went to Austin by donkey. Like, you know, this is like, and so in 100 years, we went from that to like everything we have around here. it's just like staggering the amount of change that has happened i mean uh and and and i think it was 150 years ago there were only like 100 000 immigrants new immigrants living in texas like and

now we're what 30 million or something uh but so yeah anyway like i i feel like just they're very wrong and it's incredibly destructive what's happening but kind of emotionally it's like i kind of get that from so much change that some people can really have a reaction of like oh we got to you know control this somehow and and uh let the government take care of things yeah but they're still wrong yeah i don't i don't have as much compassion for them uh kelly's got to hop on a flight we could go on i wish this could be a five-hour podcast because there's so much more we could talk about but before we wrap up favorite city in the world ooh um in the world it had to be enber

for living austin texas i love this place it's like living in a startup um and for um kind of like you know the conversation we're talking about i mean i i i have to say bruges incredible it's incredible um downtown bruges just has everything everything you want and there's beauty around every corner i think i'll ultimately end up liking bruce something the best when i go but like honestly the disclaimer that enchanted me is florence like it just enchants me to so many degrees it's not just the urbanism the vernacular but even you know the the duomo and stuff and how that got built what it is of course masonry based you know so just even the dome itself i wrote a whole book on it you know i just and the timing of it and and and uh all the the

cultural things around florence you know that were happening i just find so inspiring and they didn't think they could that's what's crazy it's like they're not any different than we are now like we just automatically be like that's impossible because of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah i'm like that's stupid of course it's possible all it takes is some people to decide it's possible so that's what i'm gonna build build build if not you then there's always a way yeah that's right i'm not as well traveled sevilla is my favorite uh that's cool city that i've ever been to like i when i was backpacking that trip i talked about at the beginning you know that kind of set me off on this journey i spent some time there really really wonderful more of like an

organic medieval city i think so it's got like the winding streets it's not just all like blocks or something you know like barcelona yeah we uh my wife and i got married over in spain and we uh we started in sevilla we went to ronda where we had our party and then i know you're talking about the bridge over the gorge yeah that's where my profile picture on twitter is like under that gorge and um we were supposed to go to madrid for like a week and a half and we wound up going for three days because we went back to sevilla we're like we're going back to sevilla for a week it was so beautiful um but gentlemen thank you for the work you're doing uh it's extremely important again if not you then who i think we can do this one block at a time one block at a time we just

need i think more people are beginning to recognize this as well um as they see in their everyday lives there's nothing like inflation hitting you in the face like all right what the hell is the problem and we need to fix the money we need to fix our physical space and i think it seems a little uh dark right now but i think we can get to uh a better place we're not gonna let this crisis go to waste a little light and darkness goes a long ways yeah you know it really does and it starts attracting the people that see it and want to value and build off of it so that's really why i'm really hopeful you can't get yourself out of a situation unless you accept that you're in a situation yes all right one more last uh trope we're gonna win peace and love freaks