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- [00:11]
A
Hello and welcome to the Four Lost Cities episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the we. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of HuffPost.
- [00:24]
B
Hello.
- [00:26]
A
We have the most fun, awesome, brilliant and exciting guest definitely of the century on Slate Money this week. Welcome Annalee Newitz.
- [00:37]
C
Hello.
- [00:38]
A
Hello. You know everything about everything. You write everything. You write fiction, you write nonfiction. You've written how many books now?
- [00:46]
C
A bunch.
- [00:47]
A
A bunch.
- [00:47]
C
You could count them on your two.
- [00:49]
A
Hands, which is a hell of a lot more than the number of books that Emily and I written. Between us, I'm very impressed by anyone who can write a book. What is the new one?
- [00:58]
C
This is called Four Lost A Secret History of the Urban Age.
- [01:04]
A
We are going to talk to you about this book. We're going to talk about cities and their rise and their fall and what causes them to do both things. We are going to talk about other emergent systems, too. We're going to talk about electric vehicles and how those may wind up expanding across the country. And we're going to talk about the Internet, whether it is like the ultra city of a billion people and given what happens to cities, whether that too is doomed. We have a Slate plus segment about the payment system in America and whether that is doomed and it's going to wind up breaking in a way that can't be fixed. To find out the yes, yes, no on that one, you're going to have to listen to Slate Plus. But it's a fun episode. I hope you enjoy it. It's all coming up on Slate Money. So, Annalee, congratulations on the book. It's about dead cities. Why should I care about dead cities?
- [01:59]
C
Well, first of all, they're not dead cities. They're cities that are allegedly lost. And it's really a book about the life cycle of cities, why people move to cities in the first place, when it seems a little counterintuitive that you'd want to live in a dirty, cramped place with a bunch of people that you don't know who might be jerks, but also why people leave cities behind. And it turns out that there's a strong pattern to why people will leave a city, even when the city has awesome stuff like taco stands and theaters. So a lot of the book is about new archaeological discoveries that look specifically at workers and slaves and women, people who aren't kings and, you know, eating pheasant in their castles. Because. Because those are the people who make the city and those are the people who, if they leave the city, you're screwed.
- [02:48]
A
And we're talking about net flows here, right? Because there's always people who leave the city. Like, people leaving the city is just a constant thing. And when the number of people coming into a city is greater than the number of people leaving a city, than the city grows, and vice versa. So I think this is obviously top of mind for a lot of people right now. It seems anecdotally that the net flows with regard to most American cities are probably negative, just because there's not a huge amount of obvious reason why people would want to move to a city when it's still largely sort of shut down. But if you look back across the grand sweep of thousands of years of history, what do you see in terms of when cities see the net inflows and when they see the net outflows?
- [03:38]
C
That's a really good question. And it's true that right now, now, despite all of the hype about how people were fleeing cities, that turned out not to be true. That turned out to be kind of a data artifact that reflected a few outflows from San Francisco and Manhattan. So cities are relatively stable right now. But what we see, and my book goes back 9,000 years because I just like a challenge. Let's just go back 9,000 years, no problem.
- [04:02]
A
Well, to the very first city that ever existed on planet Earth.
- [04:06]
C
Certainly not the first, but it is one of the first. It's a city called Catalhoyuk in central Turkey, Kind of one of those liminal spaces where some archaeologists see it as a big village and others see it as kind of an early city. It's a big place, but it looks like a village. It's like a village of 5,000 to 10,000 people. So it was an early experiment in how to crunch a bunch of people together and see if it would work. And it didn't work out over the long term. People did live in Catalhoyuk for over a thousand years, so it was a good experiment. But eventually they left. And what we see at Catal is a pattern that gets echoed through the centuries, up through Rome, through the city of Pompeii. We see issues coming up here and then a couple of other cities. I talk about Angkor and Cahokia. Cahokia is an indigenous American city. And the issue is that cities can't survive periods where they're dealing with environmental hardships and political instability. And so what we see in the archaeological record are signs of infrastructure decay, basically, as cities start to lose people of Course, it's harder and harder to keep up the infrastructure. So you get a kind of vicious cycle where as people start to leave, whether because of political instability or because the city is starting to be less well maintained, then the city is harder and harder. You know, you have fewer and fewer workers to keep maintaining the city. And so the city crumbles even further. And at Catalhoyuk, we see evidence that toward the end of the city's life, there were just empty houses everywhere that people were filling with garbage. And certainly people were filling things with garbage throughout the history of the city. So it's important to remember that, like, from the very beginning, cities were full of garbage, and that was just normal. That's sort of the background radiation of garbage. And then there's sort of levels that achieve, you know, become so terrible that people don't want to stay there anymore.
- [06:06]
A
I do think there's a correlation here with corporate pension plans, that basically cities are like corporate pension plans in that they only really work when they're growing. And so long as they're growing, they're fine. But then if you get cities like, I'm thinking about, like places like Baltimore or Detroit, where the population is much smaller than it was at the peak, you wind up with empty buildings, with infrastructure that just can't be maintained with the level of population that you have. And just like fiscally, they don't work anymore. And it does seem to be a kind of vicious cycle that once you start shrinking, it's hard to turn that around.
- [06:45]
C
Although there's plenty of examples of turning it around. And in fact, a lot of the cities that we know that are very long lived, like London or Istanbul, these are cities that have grown and shrunk over the years. So we know it's actually quite not easy, but it is possible to come back. And some of the cities I talk about in the book, like Cahokia, which is in southern Illinois across The river from St. Louis, that was a city that was a going concern for several hundred years. And we can see that the city grid was reconstituted multiple times for different sized populations. So we know that the city shrank and then people rebuilt and they built it to be a better place for a smaller population. And the population was still working together and building street stuff together and having feasts together. So that's why it's a kind of a one, two punch of political instability and environmental challenges. And under environmental challenges, I put infrastructure as an issue, because a lot of.
- [07:42]
A
The time, but also like volcanoes, but also Volcanoes.
- [07:46]
C
I mean, ultimately, like, the volcano is the ultimate challenge to your infrastructure, right? But then there's other stuff like floods or droughts or other ways that the infrastructure is challenged by nature. But if you have political instability, if you don't have groups that kind of come forward to help rebuild the community, that's when you have a problem, like, for example, with a place like Detroit, which everyone loves to bring up, that's an example of a city where we've seen a population exodus, but we've also seen revitalization taking place. New people are coming in to buy up the property. Some of it's, you know, gentrification, people coming in from outside, but some of it's from within the community. And I think it's very likely that we're going to see a kind of a new Detroit emerge out of this. So there's always a way to bring the city back. Unless you don't have the political will, or if the elites in the city, whether those are people on top of a pyramid yelling at you or, you know, people in a corporate boardroom, that's where kind of the rubber meets the road. Those people need to be treating the workers decently to make the city appealing to them, because if you don't have workers, you don't have walls or roads or food. And that's the thing that late in city lives you see happen a lot is that the elites seem to forget about that. Maybe they don't raise the minimum wage when they should. And so that's a big harbinger of kind of urban doom when the balance.
- [09:10]
B
Between environmental decay and. What was the other factor you just mentioned? Political instability. How should we think about the environmental piece now? And you have this concept that you quoted. Sandcastle depreciation. Like, every time there's, like, a big environmental hit, there's this, like, erosion of the infrastructure and the stability of the whole schlemiel. And I've been thinking about this in light of. Of Texas, right? Like, that seems like kind of a big hit for that population in that part of the country? Like, how many. How many hits can you take? Is it true you really can't come back from an environmental catastrophe? And is Ted Cruz leaving Texas like, an example of the elites abandoning the city?
- [09:53]
A
Okay, well, I'm gonna come in here and say, like, before Annalise, I want to say that I am very long. Texas. We had a whole episode on Texas. One of the reasons why the Texas power grid was so overloaded is because the population of Texas is basically doubled. In the past 20 years, and people are moving to Texas at an absolutely astonishing rate. Texas is going to overtake California as the most populous state, and there's absolutely nothing that I've seen in the past couple of weeks that suggests to me that that trend is going to turn around at all. You need much more than a five sigma ice storm to stop the kind of growth that we're seeing in Texas, where, I mean, I remember a couple years ago, I was down in Frisco, Texas, which is this little suburb north of Dallas, and they were building a new high school, like, every six months just to cope with the population growth. It's completely crazy how fast these cities are growing down there. And it's really interesting to see in the context of someone who lives in a city like New York, which has basically been stuck at the same size for decades.
- [11:05]
B
Yeah. But I'm just wondering how many of these big environmental catastrophes we can take before we're like, forget it. I think about that up here in Westchester a lot, because every winter and every summer, every season, there is some kind of catastrophe which leaves us for days without electricity. And I'm thinking, like, how much longer can this go on?
- [11:22]
C
Yeah.
- [11:22]
B
How many Sandys can New York get?
- [11:24]
A
I think a lot is the answer. But Annelise is the expert.
- [11:27]
C
I think about this, too, because I'm in California, and of course, we're now basically going to be on fire every fall until we figure out how to do controlled burns in a way that makes sense. So, as for sandcastle depreciation, it's an interesting. I mean, Solomon Shang, who kind of popularized this idea, he's an economist and a historian, and so he's interested in, like, how we can sort of use these examples from history to see whether, for example, an island nation can come back from being smacked by a hurricane every year. And what he's found and his colleagues have found is that gradually, over time, if you keep getting hit with disasters. Yeah. Economically and socially, it becomes impossible to come back. And the idea is that the sandcastle is slowly eroded until it's just a lump that looks a bit like an abandoned city. So I think that's something, again, that we have to look at political will when it comes to this stuff. Do we want to have a constant bailing out of cities or towns that are built in places that can't sustain the population? So, like, if you're talking about Texas, a place that is going to keep flooding regularly as well as having all kinds of other disasters, does it really make sense to have that population there. So do we want to try disincentivizing people to move there, or do we want to invest in building infrastructure that can actually protect those people? I mean, do we want to winterize the infrastructure? Do we want to build sustainable towns and sustainable roads? And how are we going to do that?
- [13:03]
A
This is such a great question specifically about Houston, because for all that, there was a big tragedy in Texas with the power grid. The real thing that happens over and over again, and as you say, like, it's the repeated environmental catastrophes that really hurt a city is the flooding of Houston. Houston is just a city that always floods.
- [13:23]
C
Yeah.
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A
And you don't need a major hurricane, although a major hurricane is bad. It floods on a surprisingly regular basis, and it has done since it was founded. And the way that it has been designed, with just hundreds of square miles of tarmac and parking lots and roads where there's just nowhere for the water.
- [13:44]
C
To go up, it's a perfect environment for a total disaster. When you have a flood, it's just.
- [13:48]
A
A terribly, terribly designed city. But you look at Houston, the population has been rising, growing incredibly quickly. You look at Miami, which floods the whole time, also population growing incredibly quickly. You look at Bangladesh, which is basically an entire country which floods on a regular basis, population growing incredibly quickly. There doesn't seem to be any kind of mechanism whereby places that flood a lot see population decline. It seems, if anything, are the opposite.
- [14:20]
B
I mean, one thing I did learn in Annalee's book is that the timelines are really long on this stuff. So, like, we can sit here and say, hey, for the past 15 years, Texas has been flooding and no one's leaving. It's like, but what about the next thousand years? Like, it's hard to know from where we sit. You know, it's hard to make right.
- [14:37]
A
So this is a big question that I want to ask Annalee, is like, tell me a little bit about timescales for emergent cities. Are these emergent things that grow very slowly last for centuries? How old is Istanbul? Talk to me about how you think of the life cycle of an entity that can be thousands of years old.
- [14:57]
C
Well, not all cities are thousands of years old. In fact, that's pretty rare. And cities, as you said, they're emergent. So sometimes they're built very fast. I mean, we've seen this certainly in our lifetimes. There's many cities that are built very, very rapidly. Where I grew up in Irvine, California, you know, just the whole city was being built just so Fast that you could see an orange grove one day and the next day, practically, it was a housing development. And that's the same thing with Cahokia, the indigenous city that I write about in my book, where it seems that it was a sleepy little village that transformed into a metropolis on a scale of decades. And it was, you know, just a very attractive place. People wanted to come, and it was a place that flooded a lot. Same thing with Angkor, which is in today's Cambodia. I think Angkor is a really interesting example to think about in the context of Texas or in the context of Florida, because one of the misunderstandings I think we have about cities in the west is that you can't build a city in a kind of tropical environment that floods a lot. And it turns out there's a whole history in Southeast Asia and in sort of equatorial parts of the Americas where cities have been built and flourished in environments like that, because the infrastructure was designed to deal with flooding. And so in Angkor, for example, a thousand years ago, that was a city that had almost a million people in it, so making it one of the biggest cities in the world at that time. It was just fabulously successful, very wealthy, full of amenities for the people that lived there. You know, you were talking about in Texas, people were building high schools everywhere. In Angkor, during its more successful periods, the kings were building hospitals everywhere. So you see all these roads being built, canals being built, hospitals for the people. And what happens at Angkor is that the entire infrastructure is devoted to dealing with water. So canal building, like I said, is a huge part of it. Angkor is sort of located at the nexus of two monsoon systems. So when it floods, it really floods. And when it's droughty, it's really droughty. And I don't know if droughty is actually a word. It sort of sounds sort of British. It was droughty. He was feeling a bit.
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A
It's not a word. It should be a word.
- [17:08]
C
So when you visit Angkor, what you see are these massive reservoirs and these canals where water storage and also water flow were managed. So the city begins to lose its lure and empty out as these pieces of infrastructure are more and more poorly maintained. And again, the question of how long it takes for that to happen is really important because the tempo of abandonment is on the scale of centuries. So there's sort of a historical myth that Angkor falls when it's invaded by this neighboring kingdom in the 15th century. But that's not really how it happened. That is when the elites left. So that's like when Ted Cruz was like, fuck it, I'm going to Mexico. But the rest of the. I know. Sad. Ted, what are you doing? So what we see actually after the elites leave is that the people who remain in Angkor, significant number of people, do start rebuilding the infrastructure as much as they can. And that lasts for over 100 years, where they're just recycling pieces of infrastructure from wealthy temples that have been abandoned. They're, you know, rebuilding bridges with temple blocks. And that's great. I mean, it's recycling. You know, that's kind of what you want to have happen in a city that's having problems. And then eventually over time, it just becomes too unwieldy and they have to go back to farming and smaller communities. But people never fully leave Angkor. Still, by the time Europeans kind of walk in the 19th century, there's still farmers there, there's still monks at the temples. It's more of a tourist destination or a pilgrimage destination, but it's still there. And there actually were revitalization efforts in, I think, the 18th century to kind of fix the city up. And then finally the king was like, no, it's too much of a pain in the ass, so forget it.
- [19:01]
A
And I want to jump in and just say we've had basically a thousand years now of urbanization, right? So the long term trend globally is that more and more people live in cities, more and more people move to cities. We recently passed the point where more than 50% of the population of the world lives in cities.
- [19:20]
C
That's correct, yes.
- [19:21]
A
And so in terms of if you're a city, you know, to sort of personalize these emergent entities, if you're a city, you kind of have the wind at your back, Right. It's actually easier for a city to grow than it is to shrink. Just because cities in general, in aggregate, are growing rather than shrinking.
- [19:35]
C
Yeah, I mean, again, a lot of those statistics, I mean, it's interesting to break them down because the question is, what does that mean that cities are growing? Who's actually moving to cities and where is that happening? So I don't know what you meant by we have a thousand years of cities. I mean, we have like 9,000 years of cities, but it's really only in the past century that cities have become as popular as they are. Maybe in the past two centuries. I mean, cities used to be just a freakish thing for weirdos. It was like every once in a while there'd be a city. It wasn't. I mean, the Vast, vast majority did not live in cities. And so now that we've tipped over, like you said, into having a global population that is by a slim majority urban. I don't know, I mean, when you say we have the wind at our back, I wonder if it's the opposite. I wonder if we're actually looking at kind of an experiment that can't work and that what we're seeing is a kind of peak urbanization that will wind up leading to hundreds of years of de urbanization. And that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing and it wouldn't mean we would lose cities. It would just mean that maybe we would go back to a more sustainable model where not everyone lives in a city or in a science fictional mode. I guess I could say we have to just change our cities completely, change the nature of how they work and make them more sustainable and more resistant.
- [20:57]
A
But cities by their nature are more sustainable, right? I mean like especially in terms of modern life. You know, your carbon emissions, if you live in the city, if you're in like an apartment block where you're squeezing a lot of people into a small area with super efficient elevators, you know, is much more efficient living in some countryside, driving everywhere in a car. If we want to have like a zero emission lifestyle that requires cities. Right.
- [21:25]
C
I think that's true. I don't know if it requires cities, but cities certainly wouldn't prevent us. And like you said, there's lots of reasons why the scale in cities makes them more sustainable. It's easier to provide services to people, cheaper to provide services, cheaper to provide power. You can have a smart grid, which is very difficult to have if you're spread out over, you know, huge number of hectares. So I think if we can. Again, this comes back to the stability of government, right? City government, state government, whatever. Because you can't really build a sustainable city without political will. So you can build a lot of crappy cities. You can have these like instant cities that crop up on floodplains or like on cliffsides in California. And those are cities that are doomed because of environmental issues. But then if we could get it together to have city governments and state governments that were willing to build sustainable cities, I think that would be great. It's just a question of again, planning political will.
- [22:25]
B
One thing I wanted to get you to talk about some more and in terms of political will is something you were hinted at earlier and you really look at deeply in the book, which is looking at the history of cities, looking at cities, not in terms of what the elites are doing, but in terms of what the workers are doing and how they're supported. Because a big piece of the political stability instability is the workers that are part of literally the infrastructure of the city. And that's in addition to the worrying environmental trends we just talked about. The other worrying trend is how workers are faring in cities in 2021. And like with this pandemic we just saw, it's not great. And that seems like a breaking point for cities, too. Like the rising inequality and the role that workers play and how they're treated in the city is very important. It doesn't seem like that's getting the balance right right now.
- [23:19]
A
Talk about pandemics, for sure, because pandemics are a great way to run through a city and take out workers. Right.
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B
And elites.
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C
Yeah, I mean, that. I feel like that the pandemic question is sort of orthogonal to the worker question, maybe. But I think. Yeah, I mean, your Gini coefficient is going to tell you a lot about, you know, how long your city's going to last. So in all the cities that. That I looked at, where we had data that. That you could use to kind of think about class, what you see is abandonment is definitely connected with a widening gap between elites and workers. And many cities, especially in the ancient world, of course, are built with slave labor or they're built with tax slavery, which. Or debt slavery, which is what Angkor ran on. And the. And the Khmer Empire that Angkor was the capital of ran on that. And that's just where people will give free labor for the privilege of living in a city or in a countryside that's owned by the empire. And maybe they work a couple months out of the year, maybe they work every two weeks. Just depends on how the local leaders organize it. And, you know, there's ways of organizing that kind of labor. Even though it sounds completely immoral and horrific to us in the modern world to have any kind of slavery, there are ways in the ancient world that we see that being handled so that they aren't at least having abandonments and runaways and uprisings. Workers are treated sometimes relatively decently, and at other times they're just treated like garbage. And it's the garbage times that cause the most unrest and abandonment, obviously. So I think the thing that, as I was working on this book, I realized kind of what Emily was saying, which is that workers are part of the infrastructure, except they're human beings who are making the infrastructure. They're not actually cars or walls. They have a lot of needs that go way beyond just, okay, here's a house and a bag of gruel. And they stay in cities not just because they're coerced, but because the city offers them amenities and offers them opportunities for. For social mobility. And one of the things that you see at Angkor and that you see at Pompeii, which is part of the Roman empire, is that there was limited social mobility, but there for people who had been enslaved or who were enslaved, but then they had opportunities to be freed and to gain a certain amount of money or social standing. So it's really once you lose that mobility, once that's no longer a possible path, the city starts to lose its appeal. So, I mean, that is deeply connected to infrastructure maintenance. Like I said, if you're not paying the workers well, or if you have the ancient world equivalent of gig work, whatever that would be, it's not sustainable in the long term. Might be sustainable for like a decade.
- [26:19]
B
That's so interesting. Social mobility as like the key to keeping your city alive and vibrant. Like, people come to the city.
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A
You gotta have the dream, man. People.
- [26:29]
B
Yeah.
- [26:30]
A
People come to the city if they have a hope of improving their lot in life. And if you look at everyone around you and no one's loss in life is improving and everyone's loss in life is deteriorating, you think, I think I might leave.
- [26:42]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:42]
C
And this. And the city is falling apart. You know, it's like every, you know, the sewers aren't working, the lights aren't turning on, and your only job opportunity is to do something at the Amazon warehouse where you're under surveillance the whole time. Screw that city. Yeah.
- [26:58]
A
So let's talk about another emergent entity, cities. I mean, I love one of the things you said about how all cities are either just like random groups of alleyways, or else they're sort of super planned grids. And one of the big transitions that we're just embarking on right now is the transition from gasoline powered vehicles to electric powered vehicles. And I'm really interested in what you think about how planned that is going to be and how emergent and sort of random it's going to be.
- [27:38]
C
Wow, that's a super good question. So I think that it's going to be a terrible combination of both. I think we're gonna see a lot of unplanned randomness. I mean, I live in San Francisco, so like pretty much every company that's trying to build electric cars that are assisted driving, I guess it's supposed to be autonomous Drive, they call it autonomous, but it's really assisted driving. So we see all of those cars on our streets all the time because all these companies are here, right? So there's constantly like cars driving around with like the weird structure on top that's like whirling around and like lidar everywhere and stuff. So you know, your city is being mapped and tested by these cars. And like I said, they come from many different companies and some of them are better than others. There was that whole scandal when Uber was trying to do self driving cars and they couldn't figure out how to do right hand turns that weren't perfectly 90 degrees. And so they would have to kind of drive to the street and then make this really abrupt, right? They couldn't just kind of curve through the right hand turn. So that's the kind of error that I imagine cropping up, but like in all different ways, not specifically the right hand turn error, but like all kinds of errors like that. And so I think what you'll see is some cities will like say, partner with a company, right? And they'll be like, okay, company Toyota say, why don't you just make our city smart for us? Like we're going to buy your cars, the city will have a fleet of them, give us an operating system for our city and maybe throw in some smart city shit on top of that, right? Like whatever, give us a bunch more surveillance or give us some kind of grid or something like that. And so then in that city, right, say I'll just pretend it's San Francisco, which is definitely not. That's what you have, right? You have a Toyota smart car organizational system.
- [29:31]
A
I mean that would be Pittsburgh, right? That would be the obvious place where that would happen. Or maybe like Phoenix or somewhere like that.
- [29:38]
C
Yeah.
- [29:39]
A
And then everywhere else it becomes much more emergent.
- [29:42]
C
I think like I said, it'll be emergent in some places. And other places will cut these deals because they want, you know, it's cheaper or they get some kind of special extra package that goes with it. It kind of makes me think about when cities were first getting wired for cable and this did happen in San Francisco. Cities would enter into these really weird long term agreements with cable companies to provide infrastructure. But then that infrastructure of course is connected to all this content and communications. And then the city would be stuck in that contract. And even if the provider sucked, or maybe the provider sells that contract to another provider, you're still stuck in that contract. And so I kind of imagine that happening to some cities where it's like, oh, now we have the contract from Toyota that got sold to some other even crappier thing.
- [30:31]
A
So this is the news hook, right? Is one of the two big news hooks of this week when it comes to electric vehicles is that the United States Postal Service announced that it wasn't basically doing what you're saying and giving a big contract to make all of its new delivery vans electric and standardizing on one thing. They picked like a design, but some of them are going to be electric, some of them aren't going to be electric. It's going to be able to evolve as electric vehicle technology improves and changes and they've built some flexibility into it. And there was an interesting debate about like, should we really try and go full on all electric from day one as a way of really pushing the electrification of vehicles, or should we open ourselves to a little bit more evolution? And they chose Plan B. And I think from what you're saying, that was probably, you think, the right choice.
- [31:26]
C
Yeah, sorry to have gone off onto my sort of dystopian tangent there because I don't think that that fits with what's happening here. So, yeah, I think it's, I mean, obviously it's better to have flexibility when you're, especially if you're absolutely transforming a technology like this. So yeah, I mean, what do you think is going to happen with that? What's that going to do to the market for these cars? You're the expert.
- [31:50]
A
Wait, me?
- [31:51]
C
Yeah, yeah, Felix.
- [31:54]
A
So the thing which fascinates me about electric vehicles is that there seem to be, to a first approximation, two types of electric vehicle. There's Teslas and then there's everyone else. And what they both need is charging stations. And there's this war, this kind of VHS vs. Betamax war on charging stations. And Tesla has no incentive to allow any non Tesla car charge at its charging stations. There are more Tesla charging stations than there are any others. And then everyone else has kind of coalesced around a rival standard which, you know, similarly, you can't, you know, is completely incompatible. And on some level you need that grid, right? You need someone up at the top layer saying, this is dumb as fuck. Can you guys just standardize? Because obviously that's better for everyone if it's standardized. And that tension is really fascinating to me.
- [32:52]
C
Yeah, that is super interesting because that, that is where the question comes in about is it going to be regulated? Is it going to be kind of government regulation which says, yeah, we, we have a standard, just like with Wi Fi or something. Like that, which actually was a big debate too. Or. Yeah, is it going to be. I keep thinking about Tesla chargers being somehow like the Apple App Store, you.
- [33:16]
A
Know, where it's like, yes, absolutely.
- [33:18]
C
It's like this whole, it's its own ecosystem that's kind of floating on top of this other ecosystem that's much more widely used. I mean, so far that's working for Apple in some weird way and it's working for Tesla.
- [33:31]
A
But it's not clear that what's good for Apple or good for Tesla is also good for app developers or for electric vehicles more broadly.
- [33:39]
B
I think the next few years will be the real kind of test for electric vehicles because we have an administration, the Biden administration that clearly wants this to happen. So a lot could happen around charging stations and at the same time you have all these new players who want to be the next Tesla. So I thought the reason we were talking about this was because an electric carmaker called Lucid did a SPAC this week and everyone was talking about Lucid. And it's just one of apparently many electric vehicle makers trying to be like the new cool Tesla. And there's all those little companies and then all the big car manufacturers also want to be have Tesla versions and I guess Porsche already has something kind of successful in that space. And so it just seems in the next few years we could be at this moment where there's like a lot of things get kind of sifted through and at the end of it there's Tesla and X company and the big auto manufacturers have some stuff going on spurred by, you know, the presidential administration that actually wants to do this stuff. So it seems like there's going to be some kind of like scramble taking place.
- [34:53]
A
Well, there is a scramble, right? And it's a scramble which is interestingly driven, I think by the stock market. The GM has announced it's going to be all electric and it's trying to reposition itself as like the most electric friendly and forward looking car company, Lucid for all that it has yet to deliver a single car and will not deliver a single car until the second half of this year is already worth more than Ford. And you see the valuations that get placed onto these electric vehicle stocks. And it's basically the stock market telling all of the automakers you need to electrify or die. And so they're taking that. That message has been received loud and clear.
- [35:40]
B
And there was an interesting like piece in the Journal, Wall Street Journal I was reading, talking about in the 1920s when the cars, the gas cars were like the, the hot new thing. And there were a lot of automakers, but by the end of the 20s there were four. Because it's hard to like really do this stuff. You know, it's like cool to be a startup and everything and do your cool spack and have nice pictures on the Internet. But like, when it comes down to the nitty gritty, it's hard to be a real auto manufacturer. There's so many different things that go into that anyway. So I think that we're at a unique moment and then in a few years we'll be at a less unique moment when there's like, you know, maybe one or two extra car companies making electric vehicles and it'll be easier for cities to make deals with them.
- [36:23]
A
The question I have for Annalee on this one is specifically a lot of the bull case for Tesla has historically been the economies of scale. That because they are the biggest, they have the most data from the cars and that cars are now rolling computers that where you have more data, you have better cars and they have that first mover advantage. They will always be so much better than everyone else just because they have so much more data than everyone else and so much more scale than everyone else. When it comes to automotive computing, do you think that's true or do you think we are going to have a much more sort of thousand flowers bloom sort of situation where people can actually compete on level playing field?
- [37:07]
C
I mean, it's really hard because I actually made a mistake that I always get grumpy at people for making, which is when you brought up electric cars, I immediately jumped to talking about automation and talking about how, you know, self driving cars because they've been kind of, because of Tesla, I think those two things have been kind of merged in our minds that's they've branded it as a single thing. But really, of course you can have a dumb electric car. And when we're talking about like Biden's plan, Biden's not making a plan for automation, he's making a plan for electric cars. Like how can we have charging stations? And Emily, when you brought up the example of automakers in the 20s, I was thinking about the fact that the difference is that electric cars require an infrastructure. Certainly cars in the 20s did too. We had to build the freeway system. But I don't think it was the same companies involved in building the infrastructure for Automobiles in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, building our road infrastructure. Whereas with charging stations, you guys can correct me If I'm wrong, but I think that's the automaker that's going to be building those charging stations. That's why Tesla has its own non interoperable charging stations.
- [38:25]
A
Historically, that's with Tesla, what Tesla has done, because the government hasn't stepped up to do it.
- [38:30]
C
Right. And so now we're looking at, yeah.
- [38:31]
B
The government needs to do it. The government needs to do it, obviously.
- [38:35]
C
Yeah. And so if the government is doing it, it has to be interoperable technology. Right. It can't be like the. I mean, in my dystopia, right. The government could cut a deal, right. With Tesla and say, all right, Tesla, it's you. You build all the stations. Everyone has to have a Tesla. That's not going to happen, but I mean, hopefully. And then the Hunger Games are going to happen. So we'll all be driving Teslas in the Hunger Games. And I guess that would be like Death Race 2050.
- [39:04]
A
But what the government could do more realistically is it could do a deal with Tesla, basically, which forces Tesla to license its charging system to anyone who wants it to open it, basically. Exactly. To open it up. It's like local loop unbundling in the cable system. Like, since it seems obvious that we should only have one system, it would make sense to go up to Tesla and do some kind of a deal where you're like saying, open this up and we'll use yours, or if you don't open it up, we're just going to standardize on something completely different and then you know that's going to be bad for you.
- [39:41]
C
Yeah, I feel like this is going to be like, there's going to be like a giant meeting at NIST at some point where they're settling on a standard and it's going to be very political and the people in the room are going to represent different automakers and other stakeholders and they're going to emerge with some kind of government standard. And then companies like Tesla can have their own special little chargers if they want, but they'll have to be like, there'll be some sort of mandate that, like, we need to have one of these interoperable chargers every X amount of miles on the road, or I don't actually know how they're gonna do that. Yeah.
- [40:18]
B
Now I'm wondering how gas stations came about and are regulated. Neither of you probably.
- [40:23]
C
Yeah, none of us are experts on that, but they are regulated.
- [40:27]
A
I mean, but they are regulated. And you know, those of us of a certain age who remember the move to unleaded gasoline. There was a whole regulation involved there where they changed the shape of the spout on the gas station thing so you couldn't inadvertently put, you know, leaded gasoline into your unleaded car and so forth.
- [40:47]
B
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [40:48]
C
See, the government can actually do clever things once in a while. You know, I mean, we forget that there's some awesome elements of government regulation when it comes to this stuff. So to bring it back to cities, very briefly, I think what we're looking at is some kind of regulatory scheme for these kinds of. For chargers and that we're going to see probably different cities, different municipalities and states handling it differently. Right. So in a city like San Francisco, we already have a bunch of charging stations. In other cities in Houston, what are we going to see? That's going to be the question. Right. Especially in states that love oil, is there going to be pushback? We don't want to encourage people to have electric cars when they could be buying oil.
- [41:30]
A
You know, I think the other thing though is that in cities like Houston, there are cities where, which are built around the idea of a house with a garage. And if you have a house with a garage, then to a first approximation, all of your car charging is done at home and you can have whatever charge you like in your garage. It's the much denser cities like New York or San Francisco or Chicago where people are going to feel the need to, you know, refuel, as it were, top up, like at places that aren't just their own home.
- [42:01]
B
And now what you're saying that people have houses with garages and don't live in cities is because we built a huge sprawling highway system at the behest of the oil, gas and auto manufacturers to create the sprawl that we now live in that contributes to our environmental decay. So we have a real opportunity with the electric vehicles to somehow make different kinds of choices. Because these little like regulatory choices that we make have just like huge impacts that we might not even be able to see right now.
- [42:35]
C
Yeah, there's also a move in a lot of cities. Well, again, in San Francisco, we're making our downtown car free. At some point we're sort of heading in that direction and the city is removing parking spaces as well, kind of willy nilly. It's a long, complicated story. But the idea is to discourage driving in the city.
- [42:54]
A
We did this in New York and I have to say that the car driving lobby in New York is incredibly powerful. But the thing that finally killed it, amazingly was the pandemic. The only Thing that was powerful enough to kill the car lobby in New York was the pandemic. And what happened was that all of the on street parking got turned into outdoor dining. And everyone loved the outdoor dining so much that it will never go back.
- [43:23]
C
Yeah, I hope that's true. In San Francisco, what we had been doing already before the pandemic was doing this project to widen sidewalks and also to create pocket parks. And so a pocket park basically takes up one or two street parking spots and it would be like in front of retail or usually in front of restaurants or cafes and people could sit outside. And the city got so many angry responses like just such wrath and yet persisted. And now the whole city is a pocket park, basically. We also have a slow streets program where some of the streets, car traffic is only for if you're just going to your house and you're only really supposed to be on the street in a car for like less than a block if possible. And so the street is open to pedestrians, people have concerts and play games in the street. And there's a lot of discussion now about whether some of those slow streets will stay slow after the pandemic. And there's a lot of community support for keeping them slow because they're really great.
- [44:24]
A
Like they're, they are, they're awesome.
- [44:26]
C
Yeah. Go out and hang around, we can.
- [44:28]
A
All become like Copenhagen. It's going to be great.
- [44:31]
C
I know. Bicycles, walking streets, sounds lovely. Car chargers.
- [44:40]
A
So since we're on the subject of emergent systems, Annalee, you have a thesis which we need you to explain to us that the, the greatest emergent system that the world has ever seen. The Internet is doomed.
- [44:59]
B
Explain yourself.
- [45:03]
C
So this is based on something that I wrote for my newsletter. So it's 3/4 baked idea, but basically it's based on a piece of data from the Neolithic period in our development as a species. So around like 6,000 years ago or so. So remember earlier I was telling you about that city in Turkey, Catalhoyuk, which was a Neolithic city about 9,000 years ago. So around that time there were a lot of these kind of mega villages or proto cities that were, that were emerging. And I don't want to say there were a ton of them, but there were several that were quite similar. And then after about 2000 years of these kind of proto cities growing and thriving, or not thriving, people basically abandoned the city idea for a couple thousand years. And there's some really interesting data points which I included in my newsletter showing that the size of human settlements just plummets about 6,000 years ago, just like drops way, way, way down. And then that goes on for a couple of thousand years. And then we start to see the emergence of what most people in the west think of as like real cities, like Uruk in the Mesopotamia, you know, with the big ziggurat and like all the cool stone buildings and kings and money and taxes and slaves and all the things we think of as city life. And so the question is, what happened? Like, why was there this sudden break and re emergence? So there's a lot of different speculations about that, one of which is just that we hadn't really developed a social system that allowed us to build cities that could last for more than a couple thousand years. That basically we kind of hit a dead end. Some archaeologists call it the Neolithic dead end. And, and so my speculation is that we may at some point reach that with the Internet, not tomorrow. I, I'm not saying the Internet is doomed because like, I don't have Usenet anymore or something like that. This is not like a get off my lawn kind of thing. But we're at the very early stages of building a space, let's call it cyberspace, because we love William Gibson, that we're trying to cram billions of people into. We're trying to all live together. Billions of people in a space, space that we share. And it's kind of like those people in the Neolithic who are like, well, we've spent most of our human history for the past 200,000 years living in groups of like 50 people, but now let's all live together. 5,000 of us, or how about 10,000 of us? Imagine the shock of that. Imagine like how much it messed people up to move from that one way of living to a totally different high density population. So I think we're kind of going through that with cyberspace where suddenly we're moving from, you know, maybe we've lived in cities, maybe we've lived in cities of 5 million people, but we haven't lived with a billion people. We haven't tried to, you know, come up with some kind of political or social system that can make that billion people not eat each other's heads and turn into trolls.
- [48:01]
A
You don't think the Facebook oversight board is going to be able to solve this problem?
- [48:06]
C
Yep, I don't.
- [48:08]
B
I think this is just such a good. I love this theory because we don't see like everyone walking away from the Internet, but as the Internet's existed, everyone has walked away from like these different social networks. Remember MySpace, Friendster?
- [48:21]
C
There's been a lot of abandonments.
- [48:23]
B
I mean, there's not an exodus from Facebook yet, but there have been lots of abandonments. Exactly. And I love the analogy to the city because it is like the whole world's trying to cram into these spaces and. And it's creating new kinds of behavior that's, like, pretty repugnant. And it totally makes sense that at some point we reach some weird kind of breaking point and people do abandon this way of life.
- [48:45]
A
It's hard to think of actual cities that have died or failed in recent history, but the one that springs to mind is Second City, Second Life, you know.
- [48:56]
C
Oh, Second Life. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, and as Emily was saying, MySpace. I had, like, kind of forgotten how popular MySpace was, because it's. It's so. You know, so many things have happened, but everyone was on MySpace. I mean, everyone on the Internet. And now it's just so dead. I don't even. Is it. Is it just, like a brand owned by.
- [49:17]
A
I think it's some, like, weird music thing that no one really didn't become. Like, Bandcamp or something. I can't remember.
- [49:23]
C
I know it was sold and sold and sold. Poor little MySpace. And I think Facebook is looking at the same kind of situation.
- [49:30]
A
I think Facebook isn't so hard to.
- [49:32]
C
Tell, really, because didn't a bunch of their advertisers just kind of went away?
- [49:36]
B
Did they?
- [49:38]
A
I think Facebook is going to be interesting. Suddenly, like, on the corporate level, Facebook saw that it couldn't just rely on what they call Facebook Blue, and they needed to start expanding into Instagram and WhatsApp and. But, like, Facebook Blue is still the biggest social network in the world by some margin, and is still growing.
- [49:56]
C
Oh, yeah, it's. It's enormous. Ye. Well, is it still growing?
- [50:00]
A
The hipsters are leaving it, but globally, it's still growing. There's a lot of room for it to grow even further in India.
- [50:06]
C
Yeah, I guess it's growing globally. I think that there have been. There's been phases of exodus in the United states. Like in 2019, Pew did a study showing that, like, 44% of young people were closing out their accounts. But again, young people in the States, so that's a small part of their target audience. But my point about the Internet was really something. Again, that's on the tempo of these city abandonments. You know, something that would take place over a hundred years or two or three hundred years. So who knows what it is that we will eventually abandon? It'll be some future version of the Internet. And if Facebook is the model for where we're going, if you're right, Felix, that it's growing and it's going to just keep getting bigger and bigger, and it's not just going to be WhatsApp and Instagram. It's going to be like Blap tap and Wumbie bump and like Zippy Lou and like every other company they buy, right? And then they start making brain implants.
- [51:01]
A
And so, no, I think, I don't think that's going to happen because I think we have now actually reached the point where antitrust regulators will prevent them from buying any new major network.
- [51:12]
C
Huh. Okay, that'll be interesting to see when that happens.
- [51:16]
A
Yeah, I think that has happened. I think there is a call, as we all know, for it to be broken up. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. But I very much doubt that Sheryl Sandberg or Mark Zuckerberg or anyone in Facebook is really entertaining. The idea that they will be allowed to make any major new acquisitions they.
- [51:36]
B
Got to get abandoned at some point based on. I mean, I know they're so powerful right now and make so much money, but I was just thinking the other day, because for some reason I decided to watch you've Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, which is a really cute movie and for some reason didn't see it in the 90s. But, like, AOL used to be pretty big, too. Ubiquitous. I mean, it was. Everyone was talking about. AOL was in the zeitgeist in a similar way to how Facebook is. And now wither aol, it is gone. So maybe, maybe it's not antitrust. Maybe it's some kind of technological breakthrough we don't see yet that causes us all to abandon Facebook, just like we all abandoned AOL with the advent of high speed Internet.
- [52:15]
A
Yeah, this is the Emily I like that the minute that the BuzzFeed HuffPo merger closes, she can start, like, railing on. She knows she used to work up until like, what, a week ago for what remains of aol.
- [52:28]
B
Yes, it's true. I've been harboring my AOL takes for like, the past eight years. Just like, waiting, waiting till I could say something.
- [52:35]
C
I mean, AOL's a great example, actually, of what happens to big social entities like cities over time, which is that maybe the social space crumbles away and no one's using anymore. But the name and the brand, like, linger. And they keep shaping us and they keep influencing what we build next. And so let's say Facebook dies, which we all want to have happen. The question isn't like, will Facebook last forever? Will it become the new Istanbul? It's really, is the model set by Facebook? Does that become what we think of as how we organize ourselves socially on the Internet?
- [53:13]
A
And this is exactly the same as the question we had about cars, right? Do we have a private system that is like, where Tesla basically owns the transportation system, or where Facebook basically owns the Internet, the communication system, or do we have something much more open? And I know where Annelie and I stand on this. As creatures of the early open Web, like, you know, we hate the idea that everything is in apps and walled gardens and the like, but it's not obvious how we return to that beautiful paradise that existed in 1997.
- [53:50]
C
Well, I think some of it's going to come back to our friend government regulation, because I think, you know, just as we were talking about with, you know, road infrastructure and car infrastructure, in order to prevent Facebook from becoming the Internet, there has to be state intervention. Everybody's pissed off about the situation in Australia where they're not allowing Facebook to carry newspaper stories anymore. Of course, there's lots of details that I'm glossing over, but I think it'd be great if every country did that, if it was finally just like, look, dudes, you can't steal content from other people. That's just not how it works. You can't reprint a newspaper on your own newsprint and sell it because somehow your paper is more sparkly. That was a really long, weird, elaborate metaphor where I was pretending that Facebook was a sparkly newspaper. But what I mean to say is that I think that if we want to have that happy space of many different kinds of social meetings on the Internet, like we want Felix, maybe we have to have the government come in and prevent Facebook from being the model. Not just prevent Facebook from growing, but actually put regulations in place so that we don't have social networks that are so conducive to radicalization and trolling and abuse and privacy invasion and algorithmic bias. So those are all things that Facebook has popularized and I think will soon be subject to at least attempts at government regulation.
- [55:24]
A
Let's have a numbers round. I think I'm going to start this one with $64.86, which is the maximum price of Churchill Capital Corp. 4, which is the SPAC that announced that it was buying Lucid Motors. This is the price that CCIV stock reached before the announcement was made, but after the news had come out that it was almost certainly going to buy Lucid Motors. Now, as we all know, because we're financial sophisticates here on Slate Money, the price of a SPAC is $10, and it's just set at $10. $10 is the price. It stays at $10 until you find out what the valuation is that it's going to buy into the company that it's buying. And then after that point, it stops being $10 and it starts being based on the stock market's valuation of the new company. With cciv, it just didn't work that way at all. The stock of cciv, in anticipation of buying Lucid at an unknown valuation, went from $10 to over $60, which is completely insane. It basically implied that CCIV would buy Lucid at a valuation which was so incredibly low that it would just be massively mispriced. And it's just another indication of how completely wackadoodle the markets are right now. A lot of stuff is happening that makes zero sense. Specs, which are literally worth $10, all they are is a black box owning $10 worth of treasury bills can be trading at $60. And you're like, okay, that's insane.
- [57:02]
B
It is really insane out there.
- [57:03]
A
Be safe, everyone be safe out there, people. Emily, what's your number?
- [57:08]
C
I'm going to give you a number from ancient history. My number is 161. That is the number of taverns called Tabernas in Pompeii at the time that it was buried under hot ash. And the reason why that number is exciting is because there were only about 12,000 people that lived in Pompeii. So that means that's one bar for every 75 people, basically.
- [57:32]
A
How many taverns were on the property of Julia Felix, who, of course, is my favorite character in your book.
- [57:38]
C
I know. I love Julia, I think. Well, we don't know for sure, but there were at least three. And she kept building more. I mean, she was an entrepreneur, and so she kept opening up more retail spaces, but she mostly owned baths. And baths, of course, were also very popular, but not as popular as Taberna's. And the reason why this is a significant number and more will be discovered because the city is still being excavated, is that this is the signal that archaeologists get that tells them that Pompeii was a society based around the service industry. Basically, it was a very entrepreneurial city. And when you see that number of restaurants slash bars, you know that that's where the economy was. And it was A tourist town, so it makes perfect sense. So it wasn't probably just the residents that were taking advantage of these places, but the residents were working in those places. So it was a great place to be a barista, basically.
- [58:32]
B
Sounds like a great place.
- [58:33]
A
Emily.
- [58:34]
B
My number is 35.4kg, which is roughly 75lbs. That is the weight of the fleece on an abandoned sheep that was discovered in Australia this week named Ba Rock. And they he emerged and he was just really woolly and fleecy. He could barely see out of his eyes because he had become so overgrown. And then there's a cute video where he gets shorn of his fleece and he looks all sweet and cute. And I felt it was very relatable because I don't know about our listeners or you guys, you guys look great. But it's been a while since I had a haircut, so I really was feeling it for Ba'.
- [59:18]
C
Ara.
- [59:19]
A
I had a viral tweet this week where I had a TikTok video of a kid who shaved his hair. And it literally is the best TikTok video. And it got like 40,000 likes or something. But it's the same thing, like, you know, haircuts. It's the one thing that everyone's obsessed with right now, even on sheep. I do think looking at the before and afters, though, that was very dreaded wool. I don't think they were turning it into anything.
- [59:46]
B
Oh, yeah, I don't think they should.
- [59:47]
C
Yeah, that was going to be. My question was like, who bought the wool?
- [59:52]
B
I'm sure they can process it in a way that we would want to maybe have a nice big sweater out of it at some point from Ba'. Arak.
- [59:59]
C
I'm just rescue wool.
- [60:03]
A
So I think that's it for this week, unless you are a Slate plus member, in which case I'm going to talk very intelligently about the Federal Reserve payment system. It's going to be fun. It's another emergent system. But thanks for listening. Thanks to Jessamine Molly for producing. Thanks for all of your emails. Slatemoneylate.com Most of all, thanks to Annalene Newitz for writing this book and for coming on the show. It's been awesome having you here.
- [60:30]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [60:32]
A
And yeah, next week you're going to be back in your kitchen making pancakes when you listen to Slate Money.
- [60:38]
C
It's true. I confessed before the show started that my routine is to make breakfast on Saturday morning and listen. Listen to Slate Money. And so now I feel like I'VE broken the fourth wall. I don't know. What wall do you break? If you jump into the media that you consume.
- [60:52]
A
Jump in, jump in, jump in.
- [60:53]
C
Anytime you broke some kind of wall.
- [60:55]
A
And your homework, you have two pieces of homework. One is to watch 9 to 5, the awesome Lily Tomlin Dolly Parton vehicle with Jane Fonda, which is brilliant. We're going to be talking about that on Tuesday with Louise Rogue and Slate. Money goes to the movies. And also, if you have a minute, do go to slate.com survey to fill out the listener survey so we know who you are. It'll be very useful. Thank you very much.