Revenge of "A Good Walk Spoiled"

Summary

Revisionist History: "Revenge of 'A Good Walk Spoiled'"

Episode Summary and Detailed Breakdown

Main Theme and Purpose

In this episode, Malcolm Gladwell revisits one of his favorite and most provocative Revisionist History episodes, "A Good Walk Spoiled," making connections between the politics of privilege, land use, democracy, and the unexpected afterlife of his argument against private golf courses in Los Angeles. Gladwell explores the power and inertia of entrenched privilege — and, thrillingly, how public agitation can sometimes force a reckoning. The episode sets up the coming season’s theme: What happens when a disgruntled minority fractures a democracy, using the lens of the LA golf club saga as a prelude to deeper American divisions and resentments.

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Key Points & Insights

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I. The Writer's Doubt and Unexpected Influence ([00:12]–[03:13])

• Gladwell opens with the universal fear that what a writer says won’t matter (“sink quietly into the sea like a corpse weighted down with concrete shoes”).
• He recaps the “relative age effect” argument that never caught on, triggering a sense of futility.
• Suddenly, hope: LA City Council member Audra Nazarian is inspired by his podcast to introduce a radical tax proposal targeting private golf clubs, showing the elusive afterlife of ideas.

Notable Quote:

“This beautiful, radical, provocative idea that I put out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like a weighted corpse. I had all but given up, until... Audra Nazarian, Los Angeles City Council member and Revisionist History listener.” — Malcolm Gladwell ([01:58])

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II. Revisiting “A Good Walk Spoiled”: The Problem with LA Golf ([03:21]–[17:14])

A. Golf's Land Use and Exclusion ([04:18]–[08:40])

• Gladwell paints the scene: vast, opulent, fenced-off golf courses occupy some of the most expensive land in LA, restricting public access and green space.
• LA’s “forgotten” runners must squeeze onto rocky dirt tracks outside club perimeters.
• Golf is revealed as a monumental use of land for the privileged few.

Notable Quote:

“Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there’s a huge magnificent park just on the other side of the fence?” — Malcolm Gladwell ([05:37])

B. The Mathematics of Exclusivity ([07:44]–[08:40])

• Private golf courses: About 200 acres, but only support up to 72 golfers at a time — one golfer per 120,833 square feet.
• If basketball were as exclusive, courts “would be 30 acres... They’d have to play on motorcycles.”

C. Golf as Addiction (and Management Correlation) ([09:18]–[13:16])

• Lee Biggerstaff, an economist, studies CEO golf habits.
• Public USGA handicap data reveals: some CEOs play 37–148 rounds a year
• Finding: More games = worse financial performance and more frequent firings (“golf: crack cocaine for rich white guys”).

Notable Quotes:

“A round of golf is a good four, four and a half hours. If you play 37 times a year, that’s more than 160 hours on the course—the equivalent of five and a half weeks of work.” — Gladwell ([11:12])

“That’s golf: crack cocaine for rich white guys.” — Gladwell ([13:16])

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III. The Birth of Golf’s Tax Privilege ([15:40]–[19:12])

A. The “Bob Hope Exemption” ([16:01]–[19:12])

• The 1960 California amendment: Golf courses win a constitutional exemption from “highest and best use” property tax, thanks to Bob Hope as public mascot (“man who symbolizes the common man”).
• Gladwell contrasts Bob Hope’s everyman persona with the reality of inherited elite privilege.

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IV. The Deepening of Tax Privilege: Prop 13 and Ownership Sleight-of-Hand ([19:37]–[27:42])

A. Prop 13 Lock-In ([20:23]–[22:58])

• 1978’s Proposition 13: Freezes property taxes at pre-1978 levels until a change of ownership.
• LA’s golf clubs receive “a second gift from God," calls them “insanely privileged.”

B. "Ship of Theseus" Paradox Applied ([24:44]–[27:42])

• Clubs are equity-owned; gradual membership change means most members weren’t part of the club in 1978, but legal theory says as long as no single transfer >50%, it never officially “changes hands.”
• Gladwell brings in philosopher Mark Cohen to discuss whether slow change equals the same legal (and metaphysical) identity.
• Spatiotemporal continuity is used to justify eternal privilege.

Notable Quote:

“So long as a country club replaces its rich white guys gradually... the private golf clubs of today must have the same existential status as the private golf courses of 1978.” — Gladwell ([27:09])

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V. Philosophy, Aristocracy, and the Politics of Perpetuity ([28:00]–[34:39])

• “Ship of Theseus,” property identity, and the philosophical pitfalls of legal fictions about ownership.
• Audra Nazarian and Gladwell connect this logic to aristocratic privilege—"what is an aristocracy but a political formulation of the spatiotemporal continuity principle?” ([33:19])
• Mark Cohen agrees: this thinking preserves unfair, anti-egalitarian structures.

Memorable Exchange:

“The golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions.”
— Audra Nazarian
“Exactly.”
— Mark Cohen ([34:39]–[34:46])

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VI. The Suburban Revolt: Audra Nazarian’s Propelled Ballot ([37:17]–[44:42])

A. The Big Plan ([38:27]–[39:19])

• Nazarian proposes a $4/sq ft parcel tax on country clubs—a challenge to Prop 13 that could reclassify their real tax burden.
• Quick math: LA Country Club would owe $55M/year in taxes (vs. < $200,000 now); they’d have to triple membership fees to survive.

Notable Moment:

“Right now membership dues are around $20 million a year. Under the Nazarian ballot proposal, they’d have to triple their fees just to pay property taxes... For the well-heeled golfers of Beverly Hills this is existential.” — Gladwell ([39:38]–[40:38])

B. Panic, Negotiation, and Backlash ([41:25]–[43:58])

• Early polling shows 64% public support.
• Country clubs react with panic, secretive emails, and calls for negotiation.
• Golf historians and media leap in — “Their importance is no less than a Picasso painting.”
• Intense resistance, infighting between clubs, online and social media frenzy.

Notable Quote:

“In case you were wondering, these are all rich people euphemisms for ‘we’re totally panicking right now.’” — Gladwell ([42:25])

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VII. Final Reflections and Call to Action ([44:53]–[46:20])

• Gladwell jokingly asks for a small public good: “Just move the fence in three feet” so runners aren’t forced into dirt tracks; Nazarian muses about naming it the “Malcolm Path.”
• Gladwell exhorts listeners: Next time you drive by a private LA club, “lower your window, raise your middle finger, honk your horn and shout out, ‘I stand with Gladwell and Nazarian!’” ([46:15]–[46:20])
• “If anyone ever tells you the truth cannot be spoken to power, tell them: Actually, that’s not true. May I direct you to Season 2, Episode 10 of Revisionist History?”

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Memorable Quotes with Timestamps

• “This beautiful, radical, provocative idea that I put out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like a weighted corpse...” — Malcolm Gladwell ([01:58])
• “Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there’s a huge magnificent park just on the other side of the fence?” — Malcolm Gladwell ([05:37])
• “A round of golf is a good four, four and a half hours... that’s more than 160 hours on the course... five and a half weeks of work.” — Gladwell ([11:12])
• “That’s golf: crack cocaine for rich white guys.” — Gladwell ([13:16])
• “What is an aristocracy but a political formulation of the spatiotemporal continuity principle?” — Audra Nazarian ([33:19])
• “The golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions.” — Audra Nazarian
  “Exactly.” — Mark Cohen ([34:39]–[34:46])
• “In case you were wondering, these are all rich people euphemisms for ‘we’re totally panicking right now.’” — Gladwell ([42:25])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |-----------------------------------------------------|----------------| | Writer’s doubt & the failed “Relative Age” crusade | 00:12–03:13 | | Scene-setting: LA’s fenced-off clubs | 04:00–06:07 | | Mathematics of golf’s exclusivity | 07:44–08:40 | | Golf/CEO addiction, Biggerstaff data | 09:18–13:16 | | Bob Hope exemption, property tax history | 15:40–19:12 | | Prop 13 and the Ship of Theseus controversy | 20:23–27:42 | | Philosophical/political meaning of the “continuity” | 28:00–34:39 | | Nazarian’s ballot proposal and aftermath | 38:27–43:58 | | Gladwell’s parting shot/fence request | 44:53–46:20 |

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Tone and Language

Gladwell’s narration blends wry humor, social critique, and philosophical provocation, casting the struggle over LA’s country clubs as a microcosm of American struggles with privilege, inertia and democracy. Interviews, dialogue, and Gladwell’s sardonic asides keep the narrative lively, both infuriating and entertaining.

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For Listeners and Non-Listeners Alike

If you haven’t listened, this episode takes you deep into Los Angeles’ hidden engines of privilege, the machinery of property tax law, and the extraordinary staying power of old money — but ends with hope: Sometimes the right argument, at the right moment, can start a revolution. That revolution may begin, as Gladwell says, with simply moving a fence three feet. Or it may involve much, much more.

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[For further reading, Gladwell references Season 2, Episode 10, and credits his production team in the outro.]

Transcript

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Pushkin.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Every writer lives in fear of one thing, that what they say won't matter. You toil away in obscurity. You scrub your prose until it's shiny and perfect. You put your work out for the world to see. And in the back of your mind is always the thought that all that effort will sink quietly into the sea like a corpse weighted down with concrete shoes. Have I had this fear? Oh, yes.

Worse.

I've seen it happen to me again and again. There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with the relative age effect, wrote about it, did episodes about it on this very podcast. You look at a room full of third graders or fifth graders and you say, tommy is a poor student. Alice is a good one.

But what if Alice was born in

January and Tommy was born in December? And what looks like superior ability on Alice's part is actually just the fact that she's a year older than Tommy, and a year's extra maturity at the age of eight is a really, really big deal. I made this argument until I was hoarse, and what did I want? I wanted elementary and middle schools to divide up their students by birth month so the oldest kids would be in one class and those born in the middle months would be in another class, and the youngest kids would be in a class by themselves, and the playing field could be leveled.

Did any school superintendent ever call me

up and say, I love your idea.

I've reorganized my kids by birth month?

No, never. My own daughter is going to kindergarten this fall, and some part of me wanted to ask her, principal, can she be in a class with all the other kids born at the same time as her?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But I didn't.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And you know why? Because I'm demoralized.

Because this fixation of mine, this beautiful,

radical, provocative idea that I put out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like a weighted corpse. I had all but given up until, like an angel descending from heaven, came. Audran Nazarian, Los Angeles City Council member and revisionist history listener.

[Audra Nazarian]

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you for inviting me.

No, no. So I was delighted to hear that you are the author, the instigator of a proposal to be put before the voters of Los Angeles.

Well, you were the instigator.

I was the instigator. Well, I was a provocateur. I just raise issues. Others have to make them actually happen. So can you tell me the story? How did you come across my podcast?

So one of my staff members brought this to my attention and said, you

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

got to hear this Council member, you gotta hear this. And did he hear this? Oh yes, he did.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Later this week we're going to be

dropping the first of our epic five episode blockbuster, the Staten Island Problem. But before we do, as a little amuse bouche, today we're going to revisit one of my all time favorite episodes in the Revisionist history canon from 10 years ago. A good walk spoiled. I'm going to play it for you now in case you need a little refresher. And then I'm going to come back at the end and tell you how finally a decade in de revisionist history somebody listened

[Bob Hope]

to.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I have a friend who lives in

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Brentwood on the west side of Los Angeles between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. He has a little pool house in his backyard and I stay there whenever I come to la. Kind of like Kato Kaelin, if your memory for OJ Simpson esoterica goes back that far.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Anyway, my friend's street dead ends on

[Malcolm Gladwell]

San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central east west corridors in Lake.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And on the other side of San

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

one of the many private country clubs

[Malcolm Gladwell]

that LA is famous for.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Beverly Hills, 10 minutes east of Brentwood,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

you go right past Los Angeles Country

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million dollars just to join. That is if they'll even consider your application.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

There's Bel Air Country Club just north

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of UCLA and which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Hillcrest off Pico, Wilshire Country Club and Hancock Park. I could go on. They're everywhere. Vast, gorgeous and private. The one near my friend's house is called Brentwood Country Club and it has

[Malcolm Gladwell]

a tall chain link fence around it

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

which goes almost all the way out to the street, leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There's no sidewalk.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And since there aren't a lot of places to run in Los Angeles, tons of people run around the Brentwood Country

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Club on that narrow dirt track.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And there's one thing that always bothers

[Malcolm Gladwell]

me every time I run that route.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Why do all the runners of West

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Los Angeles have to squeeze into this

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

narrow, rocky little track when there's a huge magnificent park just on the other side of the fence? My name is Malcolm Gladwell and you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about the problem with golf.

I hate golf.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And hopefully by the end of this, you'll hate golf, too.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I'm standing here with Dye Di Zoc, who is a very successful landscape architect, Santa Monica.

And we are on the corner of

San Vicente and Burlingame, and we're looking into the Brenwood Country Club. And the first thing I see is barbed wire.

[Dye Di Zoc]

Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

This looks like a. It looks like the Berlin Wall.

[Dye Di Zoc]

I don't think they want us to get in there.

[Audra Nazarian]

What are you.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

What are we seeing? We're seeing. Let's move a little closer here. What's that stand of trees? Do you know what those are?

[Dye Di Zoc]

That looks like silk oaks in the foreground. And then I see a Cedrus deodora. Quite lovely. Lots of larger trees, which are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little open space. Yeah, there's some Pinus canariensis. Looks like a redwood in there.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I don't think Daizak has ever played

[Malcolm Gladwell]

a round of golf in her life.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That's exactly why I wanted her opinion. I wanted someone objective to tell me what it would take to turn this

[Malcolm Gladwell]

place into a park.

[Dye Di Zoc]

Well, first of all, I would get rid of the two layers of barbed wire.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

The whole Eastern European feel, East German

[Audra Nazarian]

feel, would have to be corrected.

[Dye Di Zoc]

I mean, that might be some people's bag, but it's not very welcoming.

[Audra Nazarian]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

The typical golf course is 200 acres, give or take.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's a lot of land.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

You have to landscape it, mow it,

[Malcolm Gladwell]

drench it in pesticides, keep the sand traps perfect.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds its bunkers, it typically takes about. About 389 truckloads of sand. 389. Just to keep everything nice and white and fluffy. But at the same time, because golf involves launching a potentially lethal projectile at

[Malcolm Gladwell]

great speeds across enormous distances, you have

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

to severely limit the number of people on the course at any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle no more than 72 golfers at once. So that's one golfer per 120,833 square feet. Can you imagine if basketball had the same population density as golf?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I did the math.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf, a basketball court

[Malcolm Gladwell]

would be 30 acres.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Picture that. They'd have to play on motorcycles.

[Audra Nazarian]

Okay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Another fact about rich people really, really like it.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They're obsessed with it in a way that there just isn't any parallel for ordinary people. Because serious golfers are super anal about their scores, we can actually quantify their Obsession in order to calculate their handicap, basically how well they're playing relative to

[Malcolm Gladwell]

other people at the country club.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They all post their results on a

[Malcolm Gladwell]

database maintained by the United States Golf Association.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So we have a record, and it's a gold mine.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

To be able to calculate your handicap and track it through time. You will log into the system either at your course or on your home computer.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm talking to an economist at Miami University named Lee Biggerstaff. He's interested in the habits of top corporate executives.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

If you have the corner office and a multimillion dollar stock option and a Gulfstream 5, does that make you more or less likely to put in a hard day's work? The USGA database is of serious professional

[Malcolm Gladwell]

interest to a guy like Biggerstaff.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

And you input where you played and what day you played on and what your score was. And you know, after a certain number of rounds being played, the USGA will indicate what your handicap is, your level of skill, which allows you to compete against other golfers of different skill level and kind of normalize against that.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

You know how you always hear that

[Malcolm Gladwell]

CEOs play a lot of golf?

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Biggerstaff's insight is that the USGA database allows us to know exactly how much they play. All you need to do is cross reference that list of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's largest companies.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So that's what he does. It takes forever.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

By the way, it started while I was a PhD student and so this certainly was a multi month process. So it's not something the dynasty want to repeat in the near term just because it took a lot of collection time there.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

How can you not love this? Surely this is why God invented graduate students.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Biggerstaff begins with the names of the heads of the top 1500 publicly held

[Malcolm Gladwell]

companies in the US 363 of those

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

1500 turn out to be so obsessed with golf that they enter their scores

[Malcolm Gladwell]

into the USGA database.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

What you're seeing on average is, I think 15 rounds a year is kind of the average CEO is playing that amount of golf. But it's a heavily skewed distribution. Right? So we have a lot of people that are playing very little golf and then we have a tail where we're picking it up, you know, the top quartile of what we're looking AT, which is 22 or more rounds per year.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And if you go to the top 10% of Biggerstaff sample, the CEOs are playing a round at least 37 times a year. A round of golf is a good four, four and a half hours. So if you play 37 times a year, that's more than 160 hours on the course, the equivalent of five and a half weeks of work. By the way, these are understatements. They don't include the time spent driving to the course, warming up, getting changed, having a drink. Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots on the putting green or the driving range or all the rounds you play that you don't enter into the database,

[Malcolm Gladwell]

like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a fun round.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So the real time is probably way higher. Bickerstaff then goes on to show that the more golf a CEO plays, the worse his firm does. And also that the more golf a CEO plays, the more likely he is to be fired. In other words, this isn't a harmless habit, it's a dangerous habit. Remember the Wall street investment bank Bear Stearns? They went bankrupt during the mortgage crisis in July of 2007. Right. When the crisis was beginning. The CEO of Bear Stearns would often

[Malcolm Gladwell]

helicopter out from Wall street on Friday afternoons to his exclusive course in New Jersey to get a round in before sunset.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Even when his company was collapsing, he couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's first four months in office, he visited his own golf courses 25 times. One week he played three times. You would think he would be at the office learning how to be president, reading intelligence briefings, draining the swamp. No, he's golfing. It's an addiction. Right? Because the definition of an addiction is a self destructive habit. Just think if I said to you that an important employee of a major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to miss enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put his own career in jeopardy, you would say, whoa, check that guy into rehab.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's golf crack cocaine for rich white guys.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

The highest in the sample was 146 or 148 rounds recorded in a single year, Which, I mean, at that point, that's a tremendous amount of time spent on the golf course.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You thought I was engaging in hyperbole, didn't you?

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That I was using the word addiction metaphorically. 148 rounds a year is a round of golf every three days.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

And that would be if it was kind of uniformly distributed across the year. Golf certainly has a season where it's a little bit more intense in terms of the summer versus the winter.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

You can't tell me what company it is. I want to know what company it is.

[Lee Biggerstaff]

Yeah, with this data, given it's somewhat sensitive, we're unwilling to name out CEOs.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I can't believe he won't tell me.

I mean, here we have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is organized

[Malcolm Gladwell]

in just about the most extravagant manner possible.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And at the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive. To the point that there's a chief executive out there of a major American corporation who plays an average of 148 rounds of golf a year and is so completely unselfconscious about that fact that he posts all 148 rounds on a public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students. So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous, costly obsession? Do they burn through their life savings, paying for their addiction like ordinary addicts do?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Please give them a little more respect.

[Bob Hope]

By the way, this is my 15th year in television. Imagine that, 15 years of me. It's the longest stomach test in the history of show business.

[Richard Zoglin]

You could argue, I would say in the 40s and 50s, there was no one who was more widely popular in America than Bob Hope.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm talking to Richard Zoglin, Bob Hope's biographer.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I think Bob Hope has been a

[Malcolm Gladwell]

little forgotten in recent years, but in

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

his day, he was huge.

[Richard Zoglin]

Every late night comedian who does a stand up monologue at the beginning of the show owes a debt to Bob Hope because he kind of invented that thing, a stand up comedy monologue that sort of took note of what was going on in the world, what was going on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere. And he was just the voice of America, I think, for a long time.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Bob Hope is a crucial part of

[Malcolm Gladwell]

the story of golf in America.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Although I'm warning you, things are going

[Malcolm Gladwell]

to get a little complicated, which is

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

sort of the point, because you don't get to run the world for as long as rich white guys have without being pretty wily. And some of their best and wiliest

[Malcolm Gladwell]

work has been on the golf course.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So there's a principle in property tax law called highest and best use, which is that one of the ways you figure out how much to tax a piece of property is to estimate what its best use might be. For example, if I have a 1

[Malcolm Gladwell]

acre plot in the fanciest part of Manhattan that I use to grow vegetables,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I can't say to the city, that land is worthless, it's just a vegetable garden. No, the city's going to say, we're going to value that one acre and tax it as if it had an

[Malcolm Gladwell]

apartment block on it.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Because that's the best use of land

[Malcolm Gladwell]

in the fancy parts of Manhattan.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Now, if you've got a vast golf

[Malcolm Gladwell]

course in the middle of Beverly Hills or Brentwood, highest and best use makes you really nervous.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Because plainly the highest and best use

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of land in the middle of one of the most expensive and densely populated

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

cities in the world is not a private golf course. So Years ago in 1960, California's country clubs realized they have to act or they're going to get taxed into oblivion. They get together and and they propose

[Malcolm Gladwell]

an amendment to the state constitution that permanently exempts them from the highest and best use standard.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They want their vegetable garden to be

[Malcolm Gladwell]

taxed as a vegetable garden.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

If you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private golf courses are these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds and membership is often restricted. In Los Angeles in 1960, a lot of these clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly didn't let in black people

[Malcolm Gladwell]

except to work in the kitchen.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Yet they wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes like they were some kind of public amenity. How can they argue this?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They don't. Not really. They just bring in Bob Hope, who

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

in addition to being the most popular entertainer in America, is also an obsessive golfer. Obsessive?

[Bob Hope]

I might as well level with you. I spent so much time, they sent me citizenship papers from Saudi Arabia.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Oh, see here.

[Audra Nazarian]

I love to hear the whole thrilling story.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to his golf game called Confessions of a Hooker, in which he estimates that he had played on 2000 different golf courses over the course of his life.

[Richard Zoglin]

He belonged to the Lakeside Country Club in la near where he lived to

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

look like he's one of the prestigious

[Audra Nazarian]

to this day, isn't it?

[Richard Zoglin]

I think so, yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

The genius of picking Bob Hope as the face of California's country clubs is that his whole Persona, his whole act was about being everyman. He's self deprecating. Half his jokes are about how he's not part of the in group, Even

[Malcolm Gladwell]

though, of course, there's no one more in than Bob Hope.

[Bob Hope]

Isn't this wonderful though? Being here in California? I just love it. Look at that sky. It's the only place in the world where you can get four seasons in one day. I want to tell you that this is divine. We better hurry. It'll be snowing before the third hole. You know, let's move on, old boy.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So how did the Bob Hope for Golf campaign do in 1960? It wins. The proposition passes and is added to Article 13 of the California Constitution, where it remains to this day. In order to win a set of

[Malcolm Gladwell]

privileges for the very wealthy, in other

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

words, California's country clubs turn to a

[Malcolm Gladwell]

man who symbolizes the common man.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I mean, when does it ever happen that a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich golf buddies by

[Malcolm Gladwell]

posing as a friend of the common man? If you get my drift.

[Audra Nazarian]

Take me back. Just strike. Totally understand.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Prop 13.

[Audra Nazarian]

Prop 13 is passed in 1978.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And what are the principal stipulations of the proposition? I'm in a big conference room in

[Malcolm Gladwell]

the Los Angeles County Municipal Building, one of those beautiful 1930s office buildings that are all over downtown Los Angeles.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

There are four people on the other

[Malcolm Gladwell]

side of the table. They're from the LA County Tax Assessor's Office.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I'm on my quest to figure out who, why Brentwood Country Club isn't just

[Malcolm Gladwell]

a big park that I can go running through.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And I've decided to start with the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

people who run the tax system. These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They have promised to help me. You'll have to guess what they really think.

[Brian Donnelly]

The tax rate is set as 1% of the value, as opposed to a variable rate, which it was before.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The man speaking is Brian Donnelly.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

He's talking about the most famous amendment

[Malcolm Gladwell]

to the California Constitution, Proposition 13.

[Brian Donnelly]

The properties only get reassessed with when there's a transfer or a change of ownership or if there's new construction. Those are the primary parts of it.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Here's what he's saying. If you own a house every one or two years, typically the value of your property is reassessed by the city or county where you live. So if your house doubles in value, the local government will raise your taxes accordingly. That's the way property taxes work, except in California. Proposition 13 said that for tax purposes, the value of any piece of property in California is frozen at pre1978 levels. And the only way that property can be reassessed at its real current value is if the property is sold. Or to be more specific, if ownership

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of more than 50% of the property changes hands.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

In other words, California has two kinds of taxpayers. The post 1,978 people who pay normal property taxes, and the people lucky and old enough to be living in the same house they owned in 1978 who pay a tiny fraction of their fair share.

[Brian Donnelly]

You know, I've got family members who've owned their house since 1969, and they're paying. I think their taxable value is bad $90,000 or something like that. The houses in that neighborhood sell for 600, so they're paying a lot less. It's the Prop 13 conundrum, which I'm sure you've read about.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Please understand, this system is insane, totally crazy. I mean, just think of all the reasons why someone might deserve a big tax break.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, they're sick, they're poor, they have tons of young kids, they've made

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

a big investment in their business. The state of California says no. We think the most deserving group are people whose property hasn't changed hands in 40 years. Okay, now imagine that you're a private golf club. You did that spectacular bit of jujitsu with Bob Hope in 1960, which means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift from God number one. Then comes proposition 13 and you get a second gift from God because proposition 13 says that those already artificially low property taxes are now Frozen Forever at 1978 levels so long as your country

[Malcolm Gladwell]

club does not change hands.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And that last part is crucial because if you have a change in ownership, then you have to pay real property tax like every other long suffering California

[Malcolm Gladwell]

taxpayer who hasn't been in one place since 1978.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So the country clubs of Los Angeles

[Malcolm Gladwell]

all hang by a thread.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They continue to exist only so long as the tax system perceives that they

[Malcolm Gladwell]

have not changed hands.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

And for years everyone assumes they haven't changed hands.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I mean, Brentwood, Louisiana Country Club, Wilshire,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

all the major golf clubs are, were all founded before 1978. But then a neighborhood newspaper called the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Los Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article January 16, 2010 in which they

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

say, wait a minute, most private country clubs in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're owned by their members. When you're admitted, you get a share. When you die or quit, some someone else takes your share. So over time, if enough members die or quit, isn't that a change in ownership? That question was put to Rick Auerbach,

[Malcolm Gladwell]

who was then the head of tax assessment for LA County.

[Brian Donnelly]

I think the quote was kind of funny for him. He said something about, let's see, on most issues we have heard at least the question asked before. He said who'd worked in the office 39 years. But this was a new one.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Auerbach refers the question to the city's lawyers.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They put their best and brightest legal minds on it for six months. And on June 2, 2010, the county's

[Malcolm Gladwell]

tax court issues a solemn four page ruling. They conclude, no, country clubs haven't Changed hands.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

If you're keeping track, that's the third straight up gift from God that LA's

[Malcolm Gladwell]

private country clubs have gotten in the last 50 years. I was talking to someone who's a member of Bel Air Country Club, and I said, what percentage of the members

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

of Bel Air today were members in 78.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And he said, 10%. So why isn't that a change of ownership?

[Brian Donnelly]

Right. I haven't had a chance to dig through this a whole lot since I got it out of the file the other day, but they kind of get into it. They're saying if there's no one event that is more than 50% of a transfer, then it's not. Each of those little individual slices are not a change of ownership on their own.

[Audra Nazarian]

Did you find that argument plausible?

[Brian Donnelly]

Well, it's. Proctor.

[Bob Hope]

Yeah.

[Audra Nazarian]

That's.

[Brian Donnelly]

We are implementers of the law.

[Audra Nazarian]

You don't have opinions?

[Richard Zoglin]

No.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I could swear as I looked across the table at Donnelly and his

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

cohorts, that they were twitching like they desperately wanted to say something but had

[Malcolm Gladwell]

to bite their tongue.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

You know what it's like.

[Audra Nazarian]

You know that famous paradox I forgot with the ship where you. The question is, if you change, if you have a ship and you change,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

it's like some ancient Greek thing and

you change one board at a time,

[Audra Nazarian]

is at the end of the day,

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

is the ship different?

[Brian Donnelly]

Oh, yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That's what this is. The thing I can't remember is a ship of Theseus, the famous thought experiment

[Malcolm Gladwell]

described by the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly 2000 years ago.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Plutarch says, imagine Theseus is sailing on a ship, and one by one, he replaces every one of the original planks that make up that ship with a new plank until every single piece of the ship is new. The question is, when Theseus reaches shore, is he sailing on the same ship as he was when he left, or a new ship? One view says it's a new ship. This is called the myriological theory of identity. The identity of something is the sum

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of its component parts.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Change the parts, you change the thing. On the other side of the argument is something called spatiotemporal continuity theory, which says that an object can maintain its identity so long as the change is gradual and the form or shape of the object is preserved through the changes

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of its component materials. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

The city's lawyers take the second view. So long as a country club replaces its rich white guys gradually, and so long as each new rich white guy preserves the form and shape of the rich white guy he is replacing, then the private golf clubs of today must have the same existential status as the private golf courses of 1978. Collections of rich white guys, from the standpoint of the LA county property tax system, possess spatio temporal continuity. At this point, I realized I was

[Malcolm Gladwell]

in way over my head. Tax assessors were not going to be enough. I needed an actual philosopher. So I called Mark Cohen of the

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

University of Washington to get to the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

bottom of the question of whether large groups of rich white people possess ontological permanence.

[Mark Cohen]

Here's an argument that favors the spatiotemporal continuity theory. The idea that what makes the the ship persist through time as one and the same is that it moves smoothly through space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard and a replacement plank is installed, taken from the cargo the ship has on board. So when it arrives, it doesn't have a single part that is identical to any of the parts it started out with. And so there's no point at which you can say, aha, now we have a new ship, a different, a numerically different ship. So that if you have that sort of argument in mind, you think, okay, the spatiotemporal continuity criterion is the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts are the same.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But cone is not finished as a philosopher.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

His job is to consider all the scenarios raised by the Ship of Theseus

[Malcolm Gladwell]

conundrum like the museum counterexample.

[Mark Cohen]

The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is in a museum of ancient ships and a gang of crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship. And it realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece, they would easily be spotted. So they come up with a clever scheme.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

They sneak in every night and steal the ship one board at a time, one plank a day. So?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So the museum doesn't realize what's going on.

[Mark Cohen]

By the time they're finished on day number N, they have all n parts of the ship removed. Now they reassemble them and put it on the black market. They're selling Theseus's ancient ship for a pretty price, and they've left a replica behind in the museum. I contend that in this case, when you describe it in this way, it seems as if Theseus ship has been stolen piecemeal from the museum.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Cohen's point is that there's no simple answer to the Ship of Theseus problem. You can go around and around and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do you see what the lawyers at the LA Board of Equalization did they just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that has bedeviled some of the best minds in the world for 2000 years and declare victory and say, oh, it's definitely option one spatio temporal continuity.

[Mark Cohen]

The problem as it stands is irresolvable. And you only come to a conclusion that makes any sense to you if you place it in a context in which there is something sort of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps, that tilts you in one direction or the other.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So what's the pragmatic, extra metaphysical consideration here?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's that Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of all major metropolitan areas in the United States in terms of public parks.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

There's Griffith park off in the northeastern corner of the city, which only a fraction of the city can even get to. And then there's basically nothing except these massive golf courses which are both closed to the general public and subsidized by the general public. Do you want to know the size of that subsidy? I asked around. A guy I know knows a guy

[Malcolm Gladwell]

who's a member of the LA Country Club.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That guy's back of the envelope calculation was that the club's land was worth about $6 billion.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But that was a couple years ago.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Then I heard from another guy who

[Malcolm Gladwell]

said that they now think it's worth nine billion.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Nine billion. Under normal circumstances, the property taxes on that much land would come to about $90 million a year. Do you know what LA Country Club actually paid after you add up the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Bob Hope exemption and the spatio temporal continuity ruling? $200,000, give or take.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Alright, let's do the math. Together they should be paying 90 million. In fact, they're only paying $200,000 in property tax taxes. 90 million minus $200,000 is $89,800,000. That's how much the taxpayers of Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest country

[Malcolm Gladwell]

clubs in the world every year?

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Well, now I want to bring up

[Audra Nazarian]

something else that comes to mind here, which is that the spatial temporal argument, taken out of philosophical context strikes me as being, can sometimes be really troubling.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

For example, it's a very, I mean, I think there's something fundamentally intuitive about

[Audra Nazarian]

it, and I don't mean that in

[Malcolm Gladwell]

a necessarily in a good way, that

[Audra Nazarian]

it, you know, that we get the fact that we call the Hudson river the Hudson river, even though the Hudson river is at every second chance changing. It's like, you know, the water's not the same boats Go down it. You know, it's never that. It never looks the same way twice, ever. But we continue to call it the Hudson River.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

But it strikes me that in.

[Audra Nazarian]

In a political context, this kind of thinking can be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice.

[Mark Cohen]

Interesting.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

For example, what is the. What is an aristocracy but a political

[Audra Nazarian]

formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle? Right.

[Mark Cohen]

It is something like that, and it's

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

troubling in precisely that way because they're

[Audra Nazarian]

saying circumstances can change and the holders of the privilege can change, the father can die and the son can inherit the peerage, but the peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's independent of all that's going around it. And that's.

[Mark Cohen]

Yes, where the identity of the object confers, for example, a right or a title. And if it's considered to be held intact and in full by whoever holds it at any one time, then basically that removes change altogether from the realm of what matters as far as ownership is concerned.

[Audra Nazarian]

Yes.

[Mark Cohen]

So the 17th great grandson of the peer still has all of the rights and privileges, even though so far removed from the rights and privileges as they attach to the original holder of them. So there is something that is unfair and anti egalitarian about the way this principle can get applied.

[Audra Nazarian]

So the golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions.

[Mark Cohen]

Exactly.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

I think someone needs to tell Brentwood

[Malcolm Gladwell]

and LA Country Club and all the

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

others that if they want to hold spatio temporal continuity privileges, they have to give something back. Take down your barbed wire. Your members can play golf on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong to the ordinary taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come and enjoy the greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing for generations. It's worth remembering, by the way, that the most famous golf course in the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

world, the home of golf, St. Andrews

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

in Scotland, is open to the general public on Sundays. In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale Country Club, right in the middle of the city. But the golf course is only private in the summer. The rest of the time is it's open to anyone who wants to go for a walk or play Frisbee or

[Malcolm Gladwell]

go cross country skiing.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Canada and the United Kingdom, I would point out, are governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy. But somehow they figured out a way to have their fancy golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner of San Vicente and Burlingame that golf remains an

[Malcolm Gladwell]

instrument of medieval privilege.

[Dye Di Zoc]

I mean, when you fly over la, the green space that you see is cemeteries and golf courses and golf courses. You don't see parks. We don't have a park like, say, San Francisco's Golden Gate park or New York's Central Park. Central Park.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Diesel and I are standing outside the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

barbed wire of Brentwood Country Club, peering through a fence.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

We're trying to spot one of the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

privileged few permitted a walk in the park on the west side in la.

[Dye Di Zoc]

I see one guy. I see one.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That's unbelievable.

[Audra Nazarian]

It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun is now coming out.

[Mark Cohen]

Yep.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Like right now we're standing on the running track and there's someone running up right now.

[Audra Nazarian]

There are more people on the this narrow dirt track than there are typically

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

on the golf course.

Let's see if we can still see any kind of.

[Audra Nazarian]

I'm still looking for a golfer.

[Dye Di Zoc]

I'm not. Oh, I see one.

[Audra Nazarian]

You see one?

[Dye Di Zoc]

Yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, that's very exciting.

[Dye Di Zoc]

Yeah.

[Audra Nazarian]

Next time I'm climbing the fence.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Maybe we all should.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

That episode dropped on June 15, 2017. Ten years later, almost to the month, one of Audra Nazarian's staffers comes to him and says, you should listen. So he does. When we come back, all hell breaks loose. Audra Nazarian, it turns out, had for a long time asked himself the same question I asked myself whenever I went to Los Angeles, which is, how on earth do these massive golf courses on some of the most expensive land in the world afford their property taxes? And after listening to that episode from 2017, he finally had his answer. Because basically, they don't pay property taxes. The six major LA country clubs sit on land worth conservatively $15 billion. You know how much they pay in property taxes in a typical year? Less than a million dollars.

And thus enlightened, he decided to act

and introduce a ballot proposition.

[Audra Nazarian]

So tell me, what does your proposal? Tell me exactly what your proposal says, how you would like to address this problem.

The proposal was meant to be a conversation starter and to force this issue. So what my team came up with was to look at maybe a $4 proposal per square foot parcel tax, which does not contradict the state's Prop 13 requirement. It's a local city based parcel tax. And the goal of the $4 per square foot was to make it almost commensurate to what a 1% property tax valuation for best and highest use would have produced.

So, back of the envelope calculation, what would a club like LA Country Club be paying every year under your proposal?

It depends. Oh, if it was at $4, I don't even know if they would be able to pay.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They would shut down yeah, yeah.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Let's do the math. The Los Angeles Country Club, the lacc, as it's called, the fanciest and most exclusive of all Los Angeles country clubs, occupies roughly 325 acres. That's just over 14 million square feet. A four dollar a square foot tax comes to roughly $55 million a year in property taxes. Right now, membership dues for the LACC total somewhere around $20 million a year. Under the Nazarian ballot proposal, they'd have to triple their fees just to pay their property taxes. Now, technically, could all the millionaires and billionaires who belong to the LA Country Club afford that? Sure. But everything we know about very rich people is that they don't like to pay market rates for things they previously got for free. For the well heeled golfers of Beverly Hills, then this is existential. In May, Nazarian put his proposal on the ballot for November. Let the voters of Los Angeles decide.

[Audra Nazarian]

Did you ever.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

You must have done polling.

[Audra Nazarian]

We did do polling because we wanted to not just make assumptions and understand that we actually have something that the public would feel strongly about. And in our initial polling from a reputable pollster, we saw a 64% approval rating. So it's pretty strong.

Oh, you. So these guys had a reason to be scared.

Again, these are all folks that are part of the fabric of the city, so they understand that something like this would be seen as a populist issue and would garner quite a bit of support.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Do you understand that the country clubs freaked out someone. I'm not going to say who, who is a member of the lacc, forwarded me an email sent to him by the club's board of directors. Here is what it said. We want you to know that we are taking this matter very seriously. We are confident that we have the right people with the right experience engaged to address this issue on our collective behalf. While we won't get into specific details of our approach in a broadly distributed communication, please be assured that we are actively and thoughtfully engaged. In case you were wondering, these are all rich people euphemisms for we're going to the mattresses on this one.

An entire busload of white shoe lawyers

just pulled up downstairs. We've locked the gates, we've stocked up

on enough wagyu beef and 40 years

single malt to fortify us until November. But then the email continues. In the meantime, if you have particular expertise, insight, or relationships that you believe may be relevant to the situation, we encourage you to reach out to our general manager, which is rich People euphemism for, we're totally panicking right now.

We wish we'd said yes to that

membership application 20 years ago from Donald Trump. So the clubs get together, tell Nazarian they want to negotiate.

He puts the ballot measure on hold.

But then the second fanciest club in the city, Bel Air Country Club, says,

no, we're going to fight.

I have to confess that I didn't know there was such a thing as a society of golf historians, but there is, and they weighed in. What the city of Los Angeles seems to overlook is that the preservation of these clubs should be viewed in much the same way we preserve great works of art. Their importance is no less significant than a Frank Lloyd Wright home or the value of a Picasso painting. The artists behind them are equally important, and their canvas is a living, breathing landscape that requires stewardship, investment, and, at times, thoughtful restoration. The tabloids get wind of the story. It makes Page Six.

Twitter blows up.

My friend emails me again. They are throwing their nine irons at me at the lacc. It's chaos.

It's rich white guy, unrich white guy, violence.

[Audra Nazarian]

But play with me for a moment. Last time I was in la, I went to the top of. I wanted to see LA Country Club from high up, so I went to the top of the Waldorf, that little restaurant there, and looked down and said, this is an astonishing piece of property. And if they came back to you.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Suppose I was thinking, what are the things?

Suppose they came back and said, all

[Audra Nazarian]

right, they have two parcels on either side of Wilshire, right? Am I right?

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

What if they said, okay, we'll give

[Lee Biggerstaff]

you

[Audra Nazarian]

one of those parcels for a park if you let us keep the other for our country club?

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Who says no?

[Audra Nazarian]

Well, I like how you're thinking. And if this is a precursor to how the negotiations go, then that's. That's. That's a good place to be while

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

you're doing these negotiations.

[Audra Nazarian]

Can I make a personal request, please? The whole. I think I explained this in the podcast. The whole thing that got me going on this is I would stay with a friend of mine in Brentwood and go running around the Brentwood Country Club on that little narrow, rocky gravel path that is between the fence of the Brentwood Country Club and the street. And I would always say, they have, whatever, 300 acres, and there's no one on the 300 acres, and I'm being forced to run in this narrow track all I want.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Can they just move their fence? Audrey, could they just move their fence in three feet?

[Audra Nazarian]

So that the runners of Brentwood would have a nice path as opposed to running on, like, a thing of rocks. Can you make it?

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

Just say. Just say Malcolm wants you to move

[Audra Nazarian]

your fence in three feet and we can talk. But that it goes.

And then afterwards, we'll name it the Malcolm Path.

[Malcolm Gladwell (Narrator/Host)]

So that's where we are, dear listeners. A revolt on the verdant greens of Los Angeles, sparked by yours truly, in combination with a city council member who is now my hero. And next time you're in Los Angeles and happen to drive by any of those fancy golf clubs, Lacchio, Bel Air, Brentwood, Hillcrest, Lakeside, lower your window, raise your middle finger, honk your horn and

shout out, I stand with Glabel in this area. And mother.

And if anyone ever tells you the truth cannot be spoken to power, you should answer. Actually, that's not true. May I direct you to Season 2 Episode 10 of Revisionist History? Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan and Ben Nadaff Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Byrd Lawrence. Special thanks to the newest member of our team, Isaac SP Scribner. An extra special thanks to the people who worked on the original A Good Walk Spoiled. Mia Labelle, Julia Barton, Camille Baptista and Stephanie Daniel. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo d'. Oliveira. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.