From Silos to Success: How To Make City Building More Collaborative

Summary

Podcast Title: Upzoned
Host/Author: Strong Towns
Episode: From Silos to Success: How To Make City Building More Collaborative
Release Date: October 2, 2024

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Introduction

In this episode of Upzoned, Abby Newsham and Chuck Marone delve into the complexities of city building, focusing on the prevalent issue of professional silos and exploring strategies to foster a more collaborative environment. Drawing inspiration from Seth Zarin's insightful article, "Towards a New Way of Educating City Builders," the conversation navigates through the challenges posed by fragmented disciplines and offers actionable solutions to unify diverse expertise for more effective urban development.

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Breaking Down Professional Silos in City Building

Abby Newsham initiates the discussion by summarizing Seth Zarin's article, which critiques the compartmentalization of professions involved in shaping the built environment. The article emphasizes how urban planners, architects, code enforcement officers, developers, traffic engineers, lenders, and fire marshals often operate in isolated silos, hampering cohesive city development.

“There are very few people that I could spend like five hours in the car with and talk the entire time with them.”
— Chuck Marone [05:32]

Chuck Marone agrees with Zarin's assessment but surfaces a nuanced perspective. He argues that the real issue lies not solely in the training of professionals but in the organizational structures within city halls that empower a narrow, gatekeeping mindset. This mentality prioritizes adherence to codes and checklists over innovative, big-picture thinking, leading to frustration among city builders who aim to implement comprehensive and adaptive urban solutions.

“City halls... tend to attract an overwhelming majority of the copy edit kind of mindset.”
— Chuck Marone [13:45]

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The Role of Education in Shaping City Builders

While acknowledging the shortcomings in higher education as highlighted by Zarin, Chuck Marone contends that universities are not the primary culprits in perpetuating silos. Instead, he posits that the issue is deeply rooted in how city halls are structured, emphasizing rigid processes over collaborative flexibility.

“Universities are much, much harder to change.”
— Chuck Marone [53:55]

Abby Newsham echoes this sentiment, suggesting that while educational reforms are beneficial, the real transformation must occur within municipal structures. She emphasizes the importance of multidisciplinary exposure during education but cautions against over-relying on universities to create well-rounded city builders.

“Urban planning is something that is very general in a lot of ways. What is urban planning? Nobody I went to school with does the same job.”
— Abby Newsham [22:08]

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Shifting Organizational Structures: From Gatekeepers to Empowered Managers

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around redefining the roles within city halls to encourage collaboration. Chuck Marone advocates for empowering managers who possess a blend of problem-solving skills and interpersonal abilities to lead cross-disciplinary teams effectively.

“We need to hold those people responsible for the results that they're getting, not the process they're using to get to the results.”
— Chuck Marone [26:58]

He further illustrates the inefficiency of the current system by comparing city officials to cogs in a machine, emphasizing the lack of flexibility in adapting to dynamic urban challenges.

“Local government is like, wildly efficient at repeating this thing over and over and over again.”
— Chuck Marone [32:14]

Abby suggests that integrating a humanistic approach into city management can bridge the gap between rigid processes and the need for innovative urban solutions.

“It's about inserting humanism into the way that we manage building cities.”
— Abby Newsham [30:46]

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Implementing a Multi-Personality Approach to City Building

The trio explores the concept of a multi-personality approach, where diverse skill sets and mindsets are leveraged to enhance city building. Chuck emphasizes the necessity of having both gatekeepers and dynamic, empowered managers to balance technical expertise with visionary leadership.

“We need specialists who are empowered, not gatekeepers in charge.”
— Chuck Marone [39:14]

Abby concurs, highlighting the importance of team-based methodologies over siloed efforts to achieve more cohesive and resilient urban development.

“Treating this like a team effort rather than a siloed effort.”
— Chuck Marone [45:06]

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Personal Reflections and Broader Implications

Throughout the episode, Abby and Chuck share personal anecdotes that underscore their points. They discuss the challenges of working within rigid systems and the importance of personal adaptability and continuous learning in fostering a collaborative environment.

For instance, Chuck reflects on his preference for roles that allow him to focus on outcomes rather than being bogged down by procedural constraints.

“They can come across as incredibly aggravating, just like deep, deep mindless gatekeepers.”
— Chuck Marone [08:42]

Abby adds that many urban planners find themselves disheartened by the inability to implement their aspirations within the constrained frameworks of city administration.

“People who go into public sector positions are completely broken after several years because they cannot live out any of the aspirations that excited them about studying urban planning.”
— Abby Newsham [19:48]

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Conclusion: Towards a More Collaborative Future in City Building

The episode concludes with a consensus on the need for structural reforms within municipal governance to break down silos and foster a more collaborative environment. Both Abby and Chuck advocate for redefining roles to balance technical expertise with empowered leadership, enabling city builders to adapt and innovate effectively.

“We have to have a good manager, you've got to have a good kind of oversight to it.”
— Chuck Marone [27:19]

They emphasize that while educational institutions play a role in shaping city builders, the primary transformation must occur within city halls by restructuring workflows and empowering diverse skill sets to work collaboratively towards common urban goals.

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Key Takeaways

1. Professional Silos: Fragmentation among urban planning disciplines hampers cohesive city development.
2. Organizational Structures: City halls currently favor gatekeeping over innovative, empowered leadership.
3. Education vs. Structure: While education can foster multidisciplinary skills, structural reforms in municipal governance are crucial for collaboration.
4. Multi-Personality Approach: Balancing technical experts with dynamic managers can enhance city building efficiency and creativity.
5. Collaborative Solutions: Implementing team-based methodologies and redefining roles can break down silos and promote a more resilient urban environment.

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Notable Quotes

• “We need to hold those people responsible for the results that they're getting, not the process they're using to get to the results.”
  — Chuck Marone [26:58]

• “Local government is like, wildly efficient at repeating this thing over and over and over again.”
  — Chuck Marone [32:14]

• “City buildings should empower diverse personality types to collaborate effectively.”
  — Abby Newsham [43:13]

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For a deeper dive into the topics discussed, listeners are encouraged to read Seth Zarin's article "Towards a New Way of Educating City Builders" available on his Substack.

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Thank you for listening to Upzoned. Stay tuned for more insightful discussions on building stronger, more collaborative cities.

Transcript

[Rachel]

Hi, it's Rachel here, program director at Strong Towns. I'm popping in to invite you to our upcoming Locomotive Training sessions, a series of live workshops or you can watch the recordings afterwards. Focused on equipping advocates with the tools they need to make their places stronger, these workshops take place every Thursday at 12pm Central, starting Sept. 12 and ending Oct. 31. Join for one session or pick up a round trip ticket to attend them all. We're covering everything from getting kids to school more safely to investing in housing that strengthens neighborhoods without pushing people out, to building third places through Tactical Urbanism. And we've got a whole range of guest speakers coming at you from organizations like Better Block, Blue Zones, Incremental Development alliance, and more. Plus, every session includes a featured Strongtown staff speaker. You can hear from Carly, Chuck, Norm, Ed, so many cool people. So join me on this tour by grabbing a ticket [e-mail] local motive. Tickets are $25 for a single session or 1,25 for all eight sessions in the round trip, plus a couple extra bonuses. And all of that cost goes to supporting the Strong Towns mission, educating local advocates like you to make your cities and towns more resilient. Also, members get that cool member discount. So head to strongtowns.org locomotive to get your ticket today. Thank you so much.

[Abby Newsham]

This is Abby and you are listening to Upzoned. Hey everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of Upzoned, a show where we take a big story story from the news each week that touches the Strong Towns conversation. And we Upzone it, we talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City, and I'm joined once again by my friend Chuck Marone. Hello. Welcome to Upzone.

[Chuck Marone]

Hey, so nice to see you. You know, I. I generally don't listen to the episodes that I'm on. It's like I was there, don't need to listen to it. But I do listen to episodes that I'm not on. And I turned on this week to listen to last week's because I wasn't here. But we're like a week delayed. We're like a week ahead now, so.

[Abby Newsham]

Oh yeah, we are.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. So as I'm sitting here, the episode we're recording today is not going to be out for 14 or like 10 days, 11 days. So I didn't get to listen to last week. So I'm kind of anxious to hear, like, how things went because.

[Abby Newsham]

Wait, you do a great job. Have you listened to the. The Ladies no Power Hour one?

[Chuck Marone]

No No, I want to hear it.

[Abby Newsham]

Well, apologies in advance. No, that was a lot of fun.

[Chuck Marone]

I'm back on book tour now, and so I think I'm booked every single week. The last. This is my third week this week. I'm booked every single week between now and the second week of December, so. And a couple of those are not book tour weeks. A couple of them are. But I'm traveling every week. A couple of them are non. Like we're having our team retreat one of those weeks and that kind of thing, but it's pretty intense the rest of the year now, so.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, yeah, so I've heard. I'm. We're trying to get you to Kansas City, but it's. You've got quite the schedule.

[Chuck Marone]

I want to come to Kansas City.

[Abby Newsham]

Talk to your team. That's. I. I have no idea. I don't. I actually have no details of what. What the challenges are, but I'm.

[Chuck Marone]

Maybe I'll just tell them, get you here. We're doing it. I'm there. Yeah, like, let's.

[Abby Newsham]

We. We need to go to the World War I Museum. There's so much we need to be.

[Chuck Marone]

Doing, so I feel like. I feel like we need to just contact the museum and ask if I can do tours for a day. That would be like a fundraiser for them.

[Abby Newsham]

Totally. And I think Union Station has a. I think they have like a theater that people present in. That would be kind of cool. We can talk offline, but we need to get you to Kansas City.

[Chuck Marone]

Hacked history of World War I. Here we go.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, I would pay to see that, so.

[Chuck Marone]

Oh, you got it for free last time.

[Abby Newsham]

I know. It was really cool. So did everybody who is at the museum.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. Who is this?

[Abby Newsham]

Everyone's leaning in, like, what they're talking about.

[Chuck Marone]

I know. At one point I turn around and there's like five people there staring at me, and I'm like, oh, well, I guess I like stuff.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, a thing or two about World War I. It's very niche. Okay, so we've got a fun article today by our friend Seth Zarin, who I actually personally don't know, but Chuck, you know him. Is it Zarin?

[Chuck Marone]

I do, yeah. It's there. No, it's okay. It says Saren. And I asked you, I said, do you know him? And you're like, no. And I'm like, really? Seth is okay. Seth has been a strong towns guy for. I've known him for over a decade. I mean, he's gotcha. Fantastic. Really, really, really brilliant. Thinker. I mean, a really deep, really thoughtful guy. There are very few people that I could spend like five hours in the car with and talk the entire time with them. Yeah, I'm kind of an introvert, so I like long, extended periods of silence. Seth is like one of these guys that I could just talk to for days and days and days. And the conversation's so easy. He is so smart, so thoughtful. If you're not reading his substack, which is Build the Next right [e-mail], you really need to be. Cause the guy is. The guy's a super brilliant dude. So, yeah, Seth Zarin on a Rhode Island.

[Abby Newsham]

I've googled him and. And he looks really familiar. So, Seth, if we've met, I'm sorry, I'm really bad with names, but your face looks very familiar and I'm following you on Twitter now, so. Well, he put out an article, I think last week called Towards a New Way of Educating City Builders. So this article talks about the multiple different disciplines that are responsible for shaping the built environment and the prevalence of professional silos. This spans really many, many different professions. Beyond urban planning, there's architects, code enforcement people, developers, traffic engineers, lenders, even like fire marshals, which we've talked about before. It's actually kind of interesting to contemplate just how many professions are involved with shaping the physical and creation of our society and our places. And the question that is being posed in this article is how do you get to a collaborative goal of building a place? And for Seth, for the author, we need to look at the universities, particularly for planners. I think anybody who studied urban planning will resonate with just the experience of that stark contrast between the ideals of urban planning that you learn in school and applying them and getting out of school and learning how the actual world works and who actually has power to shape multiple different aspects of the built environment and how disconnected that is from any kind of formal education or principles of urban design. That's kind of all a realization that I think most of us come to really. It's despite the best efforts of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which is really a multidisciplinary group of professionals that are seeking to improve the way we build cities. Little progress has been done within higher education in the way that we actually train people who touch city building. There is kind of a mention of Notre Dame, Andrews University, University of Miami that are have some of the exceptions to the rule, but that generally tends to be the case. So there's a lot to unpack out of this article, I would suggest anybody to go actually read it on his substack, which we'll link in the show notes. I am curious, Chuck, with the. I think the initial premise I want to get to here is do you believe that affecting the universities is the place to start in terms of actually changing the way we build cities across multiple different professions?

[Chuck Marone]

No. Let me repeat what I said at the beginning. Seth is brilliant. And I really think like, this is a super smart guy and this is not a person who is coming from an ivory tower standpoint. I mean, he is a planner, but he's been for a number of years now a small scale developer and been like, seriously, like that's his job. That's what he's doing. He knows how to get things done. And the kind of work he's doing is brilliant. The brilliant type. I mean, it's really, really great, resourceful kind of stuff. It's funny because I kind of disagree with kind of the premise or the analysis and disagree with the conclusion of this whole article. And not because we're, we're like not recognizing the same things. But I have just like a completely different take. Can I start with the stuff that I feel like is a real issue and a real thing, as Seth is pointing out? And I'd like to get your take on this too, because I feel like you have the same frustration. There's a certain job description and I have called it in a pejorative way. Zoner, the person who checks boxes. And here's the setback you've got to meet. But I don't know why, but this is what it is. Here's the height limit, and I don't know why that's the height limit, but it is the height limit. That's what it is. And if you don't check these boxes, if you don't dot these I's and cross these T's, I am the gatekeeper here. I am not going to let you proceed. And we've structured our cities to be full of this personality type, this job description. So if it's going to the fire chief and the fire code, if it's going to the building department and the building code, the engineers, the planners, the zoners, like all these people, they, they have a lot of expertise and background, but in a very narrow, narrow way. And it keeps them kind of, I think, for, for people like Seth and for people like me and for people like you that are very kind of big picture conceptual, like, here's the direction we're trying to go, they can come across as incredibly aggravating, just like deep, deep mindless gatekeepers. The example he uses in the beginning is like, well, we can't fix this crosswalk because then, because it doesn't meet warrants, then we'd have to do this other thing and this other thing, because the code requires us to do this. So we can't take one step forward without taking 10 step forwards. And so don't even bother taking one. It is for, for people who are trying to get big picture things done the way we have siloed government and made getting the next step done, a whole bunch of like tiny little decisions with a bunch of gatekeepers whose kind of mindset and objective is, you know, you must meet, you must meet my criteria before you can do anything else is really self defeating and frustrating. I think that Seth is right on that. And that framework, I think where I have softened over the years is the idea that the problem is either the code or the gatekeeper. Let me say, like a tiny little defense for gatekeepers. As Strong Towns has grown, it has changed from me writing a blog and doing a podcast to now like a couple dozen people doing a lot of different things. And what that means is that we actually have specialists, right? Like people who do. I'm a specialist in this and this is what I do. I am for all the, all the positive things I do come with a lot of negative attributes. And one of them is I'm just not very good at copy editing. I write really. I don't write bad copy, but I write at times sloppy copy, right? Like I used to publish things and people would say, my gosh, Chuck, just do a spell check. Like, what is wrong with you? And I write. I mean, what you read on the website that I have written is generally like my first draft with like one reread. I mean, I'm a very fast writer, I'm a high volume writer, but I'm not a very like, technical writer. This makes me like a really good, prolific writer. It makes me a really bad copy editor. I'm a speed reader and I can read something and I will not pick up the spelling mistakes. My mind will just erase them and I will just read it very quickly. I used to hate people who were good at the opposite because, like, I would be doing stuff and they'd be like, ah, you, you've got this like, word wrong and that. I'm like, yes, but the big picture, like, let's go. And they're like, no, no, no. And I've recognized that a really good functioning institution, a really good functioning organization blends both types. It blends the people who can write prolifically and do like a lot of great stuff with the person or the people or the group that are really good at saying, all right, I'm going to copy edit this. And you've used the same word twice in two successive sentences. We're going to change that word. You've used a description here that is maybe not. I'm going to fix that. You spelled like five words wrong that spellchecker didn't catch because you. They're spelled right, but it's the wrong word. I'm going to fix that. These are things that are complementary skills. And if I were to kind of summarize what I think, where Seth and I would agree on this is that city halls, because of how they have structured the delivery of their services in these different silos with checkboxes and codes and all this, tend to attract an overwhelming majority of the copy edit kind of mindset. And they tend to be horrible places to work for the people with a big picture mindset. And that is really, really frustrating for people that want to get stuff done. Does that make sense?

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, I think what you're kind of saying, or at least the way I am interpreting what you're saying, is that the way cities are like municipalities, public administration doesn't blend personality types very well. It has too much of one kind of personality type, which are the copy editor types, or at least those are the people who become retained and institutionalized over time. And there really needs to be two different types in order, I guess, I guess to impact one aspect of city building. And I think you're even getting to something that's beyond the point of being having a multidisciplinary approach to city building, but more of like a multi, multi disciplinary or multi personality approach to city building is kind of what it sounds like you're talking about.

[Chuck Marone]

Well, this, the way that I read Seth's article is he's saying planning schools should pump out people who are like more the Renaissance man. Right. And I say that, I mean that in a gender neutral way. That's like a term of whatever. But the person who, you know, is kind of got a humanities background and is good at this and good at that and da, da, da, da. And really I'm going to say this in a pejorative way to Seth. Seth thinks that universities should turn out more Seths, which, that would be awesome. I mean, that would be fantastic. Because the World would be a way better place if we had a lot more people like him. But he is actually the exception to the rule. Engineering schools turn out a lot of engineers who are really, really good at doing engineering type things, you know, calculations and da da, da, da da. Because that's kind of what that job requires is a lot of people who will just do. And let me say this, thank God that there is right. If every engineer was like me, everything would fall down because like, quite frankly, I'm going to tell you I was not a great engineer. You would give me like a page of things to do calculations on and I would sit and I would spend hours doing these calculations and then I would get to the end and like things wouldn't line up and I'd find that I made one like small mistake halfway through. I'm the kind of person who can sit with a 300 page book and read it and understand what's in it in like two hours. I am not the kind of person who can sit and recite it back to you and cite all this. But it's a different style, right? It's a different approach. Thank God we have people who are really good at the details because those details, people really matter and they make things work and they make things function. The challenge is, and I think this is where I don't know is the solution or the problem is that universities are not turning out these well rounded people because I feel like they do. I feel like what happens is that then they either a go into government and I'm going to say this and there's a lot of exceptions to this, but I've seen this happen over and over again where the idealistic person comes out of college and they've got all the ideas and all the things and they want to be the renaissance person doing like all this and they get that joy beat out of them, right? Like no, your job is to do this code and administer this. And then let me tell you about the time six years ago when someone granted a small exception to the code and then this and this and this bad thing happened and so we can never do that again. And it's almost like there's this institutional like you either we're going to break you like a horse, where you're going to conform to the institution and you're going to conform to like this, or you're going to leave and go off and do something else. You're going to leave and go work for a consulting firm, you're going to start your own Practice, you're going to get out of the profession altogether, you're going to do something else. And what you end up with left are people who, and this sounds pejorative, I don't mean it pejorative, but when I say like broken like a horse in the engineering profession, like this is what I struggled with. It's like, why do we have this warrant? Why do three people have to die here in order for us to do something? Well, because that's what the warrant is. Well, why is that the warrant? Well, because people smarter than you, Chuck, figure this out and are trying to proportion resources. And your part is just to play a role in that. So play that role. Thank God we have people who will play the role, but government puts them in charge. And that's the problem is that the interface with getting stuff done can't be those people. Right? I mean, that is, that is the problem.

[Abby Newsham]

Right. There's so much to unpack there. But I definitely know a lot of people who, you know, are planners and they go into, I mean it probably depends on the city that you work with, but people who do go into like some, some public sector positions where they are like completely broken after several years because they are not able to live out any of the aspirations that they were excited about and what made them excited about studying urban planning, which I think is a huge shame. I do want to go back to the university question because I think, you know, you said that, you know, the university should pump out more Seths. I don't know Seth, but I agree, but I think we, where I don't agree with the article is that I think we're giving too much credit to the role of higher education in terms of actually pumping out well rounded people who do interesting things or change culture. I love the idea of the engineering department working with the business school working with the urban planners and people all working on a project together. I think that that is a great idea and people should be exposed to different areas of expertise. But I also think that like there, there are so many different types of people that come out of various fields and it really isn't the university creating like the great Planner or the great. I mean they're teaching you things, you're taking courses, you're getting the degree. And while they can help to expose people in a way that is going to promote multidisciplinary approaches in the future, I think there's a lot more that goes into how you actually play out a multidisciplinary approach to how we build cities. And urban planning is something that is very general in a lot of ways. What is urban planning? Nobody I went to school with does the same job. Like, we all do completely different things with the same professional degree. We all have very different life experiences, personalities. We're interested in different things.

[Chuck Marone]

We.

[Abby Newsham]

I wouldn't even say we all have the same common goal, even though we were educated in exactly the same way. So, I mean, in some ways there's. There's kind of a beauty to that particular set of skills because it's pretty adaptable to a. To a broad variety of interests. But I also kind of wonder if. If urban planning as a standalone profession is the silo. Like, you know, speaking as an urban planning planner and designer, it does occur to me that maybe it shouldn't be its own standalone thing, and maybe the skills should be integrated into lots of different professions that touch the built environment, rather than being kind of its own thing. Like, basically, urban design should become common knowledge. I don't know if that gets to this idea of having a common goal, because that's. That's another thing that I'm. I've kind of been contemplating after reading this article is like, you know, the idea of, I mean, he says saving the world is a team sport, which I totally agree. But there's this idea that we all need to have this common goal. And I. I guess the universities are maybe not. Who establishes the common goal. Changing the universities isn't necessarily going to change the common goal that all these different professions have. Where does a common goal even come from?

[Chuck Marone]

I agree. The idea that saving a city or building a city is a team sport to me, I think if we take that analogy a little bit further, we recognize that each position is going to have their specialty and their thing that they're good at. But you've got to have a good manager, you've got to have a good kind of oversight to it. And you don't put your running back, you know, in charge of where to run and then your tackle in charge of where to block and your quarterback in charge of who to hand it to. You actually have to have a coach who's calling the play, who's saying, like, here's the direction we're trying to go and here's how we're trying to do it. And I feel like, what is missing from this, okay, if we went back. I always say this, like, if we went back a hundred years, and what I'm really saying is, like, if we went back pre Great Depression and you were building a City and you were serious about the act of city building, your community would have a town architect and that town architect, that would be like the name of the position. Maybe you would call it a city manager, maybe you would call it a town engineer. It depends on how you would. The label's not as important as the function. Such a person would be kind of the jack of all trades. Right. They would not be like a hardcore architect or a hardcore engineer. They would be someone who understood how the different things come together. I think in an ideal way, this is the way we think of planners today. Although a lot of planning schools will train you to be a zoner and not to be this well rounded person who has a bit of urban design, a bit of urban theory, a bit of this and that. So this person would in a sense be the problem solver, the person with the vision, the person who could interact with the developer and the private sector, interact with the politicians and the people they were working for, but also then be able to mobilize a team of experts and a team of specialists in order to accomplish goals and get things done. There are times when checklists are really, really helpful. Checklists are really helpful for. Have we thought of everything? Is there something we're missing? But when checklists become the thing that runs an organization or runs a process, what that means is that the outcome has to become really simple and stupid. It can't be dynamic, it can't be customized, it can't be all those things. The way you get kind of the best of both worlds is to have really empowered managers who are the kind of people that Seth would like colleges to spit out. Which, by the way, I, I think colleges are spinning out. I mean, I do think that we are producing a lot of these people. We need to have those kind of people who are empowered to make decisions, to color outside the lines, to, you know, within a certain parameter, be able to tweak things and work on things and keep things moving. And we need to hold those people responsible for the results that they're getting, not the process they're using to get to the results.

[Abby Newsham]

So planning directors and city managers and I mean, this doesn't touch. I mean, I guess it touches development because of zoning, but I mean, ultimately it sounds like you're talking about having really strong leadership that has a fundamental understanding of urban design and practice.

[Chuck Marone]

Yes, but you know, you know that when you go to a city hall and you start talking to the people in charge, you can tell within 15 minutes whether they're going to be a good group to work with or not. And I mean, the ones that are horrible are like, well, hang on. We've got to, you know, we've got this thing or that thing. We got to follow. You know, we got. It's not a matter of, like, working through nuance. I mean, everybody has to do that. But it is the rote kind of, here's the rulebook. We're following this. Bam. And you can see the people who are like, they're focused on the process as opposed to focused on the outcomes. You have mentioned planners and you've mentioned urban design. I actually, in the cities that I have been in that are the most dynamic, I can tell you the type today that I think would work the best for doing a lot of this. And they're social workers. Social workers. There's a lot of social workers, I think, that come with the same gatekeeper mentality. And those people should largely be fired. I think that those people tend to be really bad at their jobs. There's a. Social workers who are fantastic at their jobs have to bridge two things. One, they have to bridge a system of rules that are very kind of established and kind of unfriendly and difficult to work with. Here's this program. Here's the five requirements. Here's this program. Here's the three requirements. Here's the things that I have to do. Here's the boxes I have to check, the reports I have to write, the things I have to accomplish. Then over here, you have really messy people who are doing really messy things that are very, very difficult to deal with. You have to meet them in a different space. Every single person has their own story, their own starting space, their own ending space. It's all complicated. It's all really difficult. Social workers have to work in between those two things. They have to take all this messiness and then fit it in these boxes. And what winds up happening is they become really, really adept at kind of calming the messiness and. And massaging the boxes to make it work. That is not like one extreme or the other, right? You have to fit every box or go away. Because then you're a horrible social worker, right? Like, if you don't come in here with three forms filled out and all this, you can't talk to me. Go away. That's a horrible social worker. A horrible social worker is those. Also, let me just go and have tons of empathy and like, whatever I need to help you. And then screw the paperwork, screw the boxes, screw all this. Cause they will wind up getting In a lot of trouble that way. The best ones bridge this gap. And I think that we don't necessarily need a world of super dynamic city managers that can overcome all this and marshal the troops and be the Eisenhower of the city Hall. I think what we do need is we do need to break a lot of what we do down into simpler routines and then let more dynamic people sit in the middle of experts who are these, like, deeply technical gatekeeping kind of people, and give them the power to, like, make this stuff work and make this stuff go.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, yeah. So really integrating not just. Not necessarily urban design per se, but just like a human approach to multi. Yeah, it's like. That's what I'm hearing from you is that it's just about, like, inserting humanism into the way that we manage building cities. Because it has become so codified. And it's not just zoning. I mean, there's. There's so many. There's so many codified, institutionalized aspects of how cities come together. It's. I think it is beyond, like, just the professions. I mean, because I know we want to point fingers at, like, well, the traffic engineers are ruining things or the fire marshals are doing xyz.

[Chuck Marone]

And they are, they are and they are. But.

[Abby Newsham]

But it's like, it is this, like, institutionalized system of codes and rules all the way down to, like, lending, which is something that, you know, we haven't talked about. But it's. I mean, it's. There's so many things that are like. It's. We've basically delved all these different professions down to a formula rather than inserting, like, I don't know, basic human, like, logic into the equation. It's kind of like we're running our cities on, like, a really sad AI system with no oversight.

[Chuck Marone]

I feel like a sad AI would be better in some ways.

[Abby Newsham]

So it might be.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. If you put this in Strong Town's words, the suburban experiment was all about turning cities into machines of growth. We were going to take these things that grew in this complex incremental way with a lot of internal feedbacks, but it was messy and slow, but strong ultimately, a lot of adaptability and strength. We needed cities to grow faster. We needed to stay out of the Great Depression. We needed to build housing for people at the end of World War II. We needed to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And so simplify. Take out all of that complexity of having the town architect and building a great place, and let's just turn cities into machines that grow when you have a machine and you want an outcome. Growth, new housing, new commercial properties, new roads, new sewers, new this expansion. Boom, boom, boom. What you need are cogs. You need people in your machine who can function like a cog. Okay, My cog in this machine is to verify that you meet the right zoning requirements, you meet the proper setbacks, you've got the right coverage amounts, you are doing an allowable use, you meet the right density. If you can check all those boxes, my cog will move. And then you go over and talk to the fire official, and then you go over and talk to the engineer. And so it became this, like, cog. People say local government's inefficient. Local government is like, wildly efficient. It's wildly efficient at repeating this thing over and over and over again. What we are not good at, and what I see people like Seth really struggling with, is that if you actually want to thicken up a place, if you want to not just repeat the same thing over and over again, but actually go back and renovate something, expand something, mature a neighborhood, make it work better. This cog process does not work. It makes it impossible to reuse and redevelop and make stronger our existing neighborhoods. And I don't think that is a failure. This is where I think that Seth and I, I'm not like, adamantly opposed to what he's saying. I think he's misidentified the problem. I think he sees the problem as deficient, deficiently trained professionals. And I actually think that it is deficiently organized structures within City hall where we have empowered the wrong people to do the wrong thing.

[Abby Newsham]

And I'll go beyond City Hall. I think this idea of creating machines and a mechanistic way of how we manage and grow society, it spans beyond the public sector, certainly. And that's what makes me sad about, you know, to Seth's point, it's like, he's a planner, I'm a planner. I didn't know that. Becoming a planner is basically like signing up for a long term existential crisis. I feel like planners are basically like. Planners are basically like social worker types who love design complex systems. It's very associated, I would say, with social, Social work and people who may go into social work. And so many times people, especially if they go to urban design school rather than like a more, I guess, public administration focused urban planning school, a lot of people then get ushered into positions where you do become a cog in the machine and you aren't empowered. And I, I Don't know. I, I know that a lot of professions are like this, but it's, it is unfortunate. And I think that the idea of having more space for like adapting multiple different professions is, is really important if we're, we want to actually build great cities. I, I do still have the question around having a common goal though. Like, because as this article points out, people in different professions often come out of these professions, or not for the professions, but rather the universities. They are not speaking the same language. They don't have a shared understanding of what a city even is. So I do understand that aspect of his argument that you can go to engineering school and never really contemplate or read about like what urban planning or a city really is. So I think that, that I do agree with the aspect of having some kind of exposure to multi, to multiple different disciplines while you're a student, to have some kind of shared understanding at least of like urban planning theory.

[Chuck Marone]

I agree to a point. I don't want to sound derogatory because I hope I put in a defense for like people who have this personality type because I've grown to like, deeply appreciate it instead of be frustrated by it. Let's say that you are going into accounting and what gives you joy every day is working with numbers, making them balance, tracking expense reports, making sure that you've got a very clean balance sheet, that everything is where it's supposed to be, that everything lines up that you can justify. And there are people who, like, that brings them great joy. Like that brings.

[Abby Newsham]

That's my mother, she's an accountant.

[Chuck Marone]

Okay. To me, this would be my nightmare. Like, if you want to send me to eternal hell, make me work as an accountant tracking expense reports and all this stuff, this would be my eternal hell. I would be horrible at it. I am horrible at it. But thank God we have people who, that is like the thing that gives them joy that they feel fulfilled doing. I think if we said the people who do that need to also understand macroeconomic theory, they need to understand how to arbitrage currencies across different countries. They need to, they need to have an understanding of, you know, all this other stuff, like, yeah, that would be great. That would make them like a more well rounded person. That would give them a bigger view of like what they're doing. It might also make them insane because they really just want to make the expense report balance with the income statement. And thank God they do, right?

[Abby Newsham]

I mean, I agree with you to some extent, but I'm thinking more like people who Are learning people who are getting a degree that impacts the physical built environment. Like anything that affects how cities are built. If you're going to become an architect or an engineer, like you should at least be exposed to some basic urban planning theory like Kevin lynch, like, like some, just some basic urban planning theory history. I think that would be beneficial.

[Chuck Marone]

I have sitting on my table right here, my eldest, my, my youngest daughter's graduation photos. These cost a lot of money. She went out and did like, you know, pictures all over the place. And there's a photographer here in the art center that my office is in who did these photos and did just like a tremendous job, right? For 11 prior years. She has gotten the school photo, which the school photo is. You go sit in a chair, there's the same background behind you. Hopefully you smile well, because you get one crack at it. They take a picture of you and then the next kid sits down there, right? And we've got year after year after year of those. And now one multi. I think there's 10 photos that were chosen out of like 200 or something. I don't know what it was. Different outfits, different settings. I just pay the bills and smile. It's great. If you are trying to create a yearbook with 2,000 kids in it and have standardized photos, you could do that for 1995 and you can have the kids come in and all sit in the same chair and all do the same thing. You will have some photos that turn out pretty good. You will have some photos that are really horrible. You will have kind of a narrow margin of quality, but you will accomplish what you want. Lots and lots of photos of the kids and get them in a yearbook. If you want a yearbook with 100 students or 200 students who all have like really fancy, nice done photos, that's going to cost you $1,000 a kid. And they're going to have to do that themselves because they're going to have to schedule it on their own time and go out to different places and do different things. If you want to make a movie, you're going to have to have a multimillion dollar budget because you're going to have to have specialists and all these different things. You have to bring them together. You're going to have to shoot this, you're going to have to have a director and a producer and all this stuff. I feel like what it comes down here is that we have put a lot of people who do 30 second photography in charge of doing a movie. And the reality is they should Be working on a movie, but not in charge of it. And no one should have to go to them to create a movie. They should work for the people who are creating the movie. Seth wants to create movies and he's like, to get a movie, I have to go talk to all these individual people to get approval. And he shouldn't have to do that. There should be people at city hall whose job is to get the person who's really good at snapping the photo of the kid to, to say yes, okay, bam, we go, we go, we go. And I think that this is not a human failing problem. This is not a problem of like, people are not well trained, they don't do their jobs well. It is a problem of structuring government to do one thing, create photos of kids over and over again, as opposed to another thing, create a movie or create beautiful grad photos of a person that you'll get once in your life. I think that we need to be producing the equivalent of those grad photos over and over and over again. And that means you need specialists who are empowered, not gatekeepers in charge. But you need gatekeepers, right? You need an accountant, you need a bookkeeper who does expense reports. You need a person who can just take the regular photos for the kids. Like you actually need those people. They are very important. And if you don't treat them well, you don't pay them well, you don't take care of them, things don't work. You have to love them like they're. But those are. That's a different position than, you know, the. Yeah, the person who should be making the decisions about how your city evolves.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. So, so not multidisciplinary approach, a multi personality approach to city building. Yeah, that's what's needed.

[Chuck Marone]

I mean, if we take the difference between a small town and a big city in a small town. And this is why I loved early in my career working in small towns. One dynamic person in a small town can make a massive amount of difference because you can actually get through all those gatekeepers really super easy. You can make things work. It's kind of a human level decision making process. One gatekeeper in a small town can screw the whole place up for decades and decades. They can wreck a place very quickly. When you get to a big city or a mid sized city, you start to develop, I think, more silos and hierarchies in a way that is both natural for the efficient running of the organization, but also detrimental to this idea of needing more Nuance, more flexibility, more kind of capacity to paint outside the lines. And I think the way you get around that is you allow the silos of specialty to stay, but you take the decision making process out and make that these kind of geographic, team kind of things. So if I'm applying for a permit, I'm going to meeting with literally like a social worker who is then working with a team of specialists to like accomplish goals within the neighborhood. If I'm doing a project, a street project, I don't give it to my engineer to go get, do the design and then ask every siloed department to comment on it. That's so dysfunctional. I'm taking my social worker who's going out there and has a team of professionals saying, all right, here's all the things we're trying to figure out here. Engineer, what's your input? Planner, what's your input? Maintenance person, what's your input like? Let's try to blend these together.

[Abby Newsham]

Like work together. Yeah. Actually treating this like a team effort rather than a siloed effort.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. And I keep saying social worker. It doesn't have to be a social worker, but it's a mindset. You know, if we do team projects today, we'll say, well, the engineer's in charge of this team. The engineer will then will do the design and then everybody else on the team gets a chance to comment. But you're commenting on the engineer supreme. You know, the engineer is like the supreme person in this and you're commenting on their thing. I'm saying put the least technical person in charge who is just like a good problem solver, people person. Let's figure this out and then let the technical experts, the gatekeepers, the box checkers, the deeply technical people who we really need because they're really important, they do important things. Let them work for those people.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great point. Rather than giving them all of the authority over everything, which is often the case. So it's really a power issue too.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. Okay. I met someone this week. She's the mayor of a mid sized city in Massachusetts. Just a dynamic, wonderful person, like really, really good. I got the impression that she's really, really good at her job. She was certainly great to be around. She told me that she went to school originally to be a teacher and got into student teaching and realized like right away, like, whoa, this is not for me. Both of my parents later in life became elementary school teachers and went through the student teaching process and then had student teachers in their Classroom. And they said like, if there was a way to accelerate that student teaching experience, make it a third year thing instead of a end of your fourth year thing, it would be really helpful for the profession because a lot of people would like to be a teacher in theory, but then when they're in a room with students, they're like, whoa, this is not for me at all. It's a different set of skills. It's a different set of things. Does that mean that this, like, Mare, because she couldn't, she recognized that she wasn't good at teaching, was not going to be good at like. No. I mean, she has all kinds of other skills that are fantastic, but they're not like in a classroom kind of skills. Thank God we have people who are really good at in classroom kind of skills. What we need to do is like line up people with the tasks that we're trying to get done, not to change, not to use the education process to in a sense, overcome what we think of as like defects of, of a system.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah. Huh? Yeah. I mean, and to me, the way I interpret that is like empowering people to adapt to multiple different roles in society that serve from a personality sense what they're, what they're good at and what they're interested in. I mean, I think a lot of people go into disciplines that are like specific functions or professions, and they may love that, but like I mentioned earlier, everybody I went to school with, we, I went to a studio based urban planning design school and we all do different things and each of us are doing a job that totally aligns with like our personalities and what we were good at in studio, and we were all different. And I think that that's something that's really cool about urban planning generally for, for all its flaws. Like, it is something that I think provides some adaptability and in teaching is something that I would think is, is less adaptable. Like you're going into teaching and it's more specific and I mean it's, it's good that she was able to make that pivot and do something different. But it can be hard for people who spend a lot of time going down a road and now they're in this profession.

[Chuck Marone]

Well, there's, there's a lot of people who take to zoning really well. And I, I get frustrated with those people, but it's not that they're bad. It's not that they're bad people or bad at what they do. The thing that I tend to get frustrated with is that we've given People who are comfortable filling that role and get joy and satisfaction out of filling that role, We've given them too much power.

[Abby Newsham]

A lot of power. Yeah.

[Chuck Marone]

Within our system.

[Abby Newsham]

Totally. I think that's totally right. And that's not just zoners. Like, that's. That's people, you know, all types of people who are kind of more like checkbox.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. Let me talk about someone personally, and she might listen to this, so I'm gonna. I think I can say this without hurting her feelings in any way. Sheena on our staff is our content team leader. Sheena is so dynamic, and she's dynamic because she can do two things that are kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. One, she is a great writer. I mean, she is a fantastic writer. She's not as fast a writer as I am or prolific as writers. I am. But when she writes, she writes just amazing prose. Like, it's really, really good. She is also an incredible detail person and is really, really good at editing, at copy editing, at catching the, like, the little things and the little details, a little nuance. That kind of person is super rare. Like, super rare. To balance those two things out, we have other people on our team who are, like, really, really good at copy editing. Really, really good at those detailed things. I think that would be brutally unfair to ask the people who are good at, like, those detail things to now, you know, write a 5,000 word essay and you've got eight hours to do it. It's just not. It's not their skill. Right. And I think, you know, if you ask someone like Sheena to do that, who's like a, you know, one in a million kind of person, they might be able to pull that off. I don't know if Sheena would be really happy if we asked her to do that. You know, like, I don't think that would be like her joy zone at all. But if you asked me to do the writing, I would love it. If you asked me to do the editing, it would be my nightmare. To me, I feel like there's a lot of opportunities for a lot of people to find. Go to what Seth said. City building is a team effort. I think that when we look and recognize that, we recognize that we have many skills on our team, our universities are creating a lot of those skills. The entry level jobs and the training people get are creating a lot of those skills. But managing and box checking are two different skills and we need both. But they should be not doing the same thing. They should be doing different things. There are very few Sheenas out there who can competently do both.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Marone]

And you're not going to create them in college because Sheena is a freak. There's not a lot of people like her. She's just able to do all kinds of things that, like, normal human beings can't do. Right?

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah. And again, I think we're giving, like, universities too much. I don't want to say credit, but it's like we're giving them too much responsibility to create, I think, the type of dynamic places that we'd like to see. Like, they have a role, but they're not. I don't think that they are the fundamental issue here. There's a lot that could be improved, but I don't think they're the fundamental issue.

[Chuck Marone]

Well, I'm sure if you back out Seth's journey, Seth was going to point to his time at the university and say, this was really, really formative for me. I got a ton out of this. I would say the same thing. I think, though, that it would be incorrect to say Seth the box checker, you know, narrow, kind of focused person, goes to college, becomes Renaissance person, is now, like, seeing Big Seth was who he was.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah. He's a Renaissance man already.

[Chuck Marone]

Yes.

[Abby Newsham]

He was born Renaissance man.

[Chuck Marone]

Yes. Expanded that. And. And, you know, and.

[Abby Newsham]

And you're at. For a Renaissance man, like, your education at speaking as a Renaissance man myself.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah.

[Abby Newsham]

Your education is not just about university. Like, it keeps going. You. You learn about strong towns, you learn about cnu, you go to conferences, you meet new people. You. I mean, it's like everything you do is all about learning new things for the Renaissance.

[Chuck Marone]

Can we improve education? Absolutely. Could colleges get better? Yes, no doubt. But if you said you can transform one of these things overnight, university training for professionals or the structure of city halls, to me, I picked the structure of city hall. And that's something that everybody listening to this, your city can fix this tomorrow. I mean, literally, you can change these things. You have the ability to change these. Universities are much, much harder to change.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah. All right. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate this conversation. I was excited. I didn't know where we were going to take this, so I.

[Chuck Marone]

It's a great article.

[Abby Newsham]

It's a great article. Yeah.

[Chuck Marone]

I mean, Seth is a fantastic writer. I mean, he is a great writer.

[Abby Newsham]

He's a great writer. And. And shout out to Kevin Klingenberg for sending this to me. So. Yeah. And his Messy City podcast. So we're gonna do the down zone now. You wanna do Down Zone?

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah. I'm in.

[Abby Newsham]

Okay. What do you have today?

[Chuck Marone]

This week, the book that I went through was called Moonwalking with Einstein. And the subtitle is the Art and Science of Remembering Everything. And it attacked this idea that there's such a thing as a photographic memory. And it went into the idea that people can remember huge amounts of things, and there are kind of like, mental tricks to doing it. I am myself, really horrible at remembering names. Like, I'm just horrible at it. Like, I can meet someone and they'll introduce themselves to me and they'll say, hi, I'm this. And literally, by the time I'm done shaking their hand, I have forgotten their name. It is, like, out of my brain.

[Abby Newsham]

I'm the same way. But the face. You remember the face, right?

[Chuck Marone]

I remember the face, but I have an impossible time. I try to Facebook friend people because that's the one place I can connect names and faces really easily. But, you know, a lot of younger people aren't on Facebook, and, you know, a lot of people, it seems like fewer people are on Facebook. LinkedIn I can do this with. But to me, it's. The Facebook one is easier because it's more photos and it's more kind of personal, and I can connect those things easier. This book was really interesting because it did. It gave kind of a history and an understanding of how the brain works and how you are able to kind of remember some of these things. And then it gave some kind of practical advice for how to do it. And I finished on the way home, so I haven't really. I got home super late and got up early and all that. So I've not really put this to practice yet. But my goal is to actually be able to go into a room of people that I have met and remember everybody's name, at least their first name, and at least for the duration of the conversation. So we're going to have to. That's what I'm working up to.

[Abby Newsham]

Life goal. Okay. I appreciate another life goal for you.

[Chuck Marone]

I would say if you want to improve your memory, there's a little bit of, like, parlor trickness here. But there's also, I think, some things that are real and tangible. And, yeah, it was an easy book. It was an easy book to read and kind of fun and, you know, go ahead and read it. Moonwalking with Einstein.

[Abby Newsham]

Love that. That's a great title, too.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah.

[Abby Newsham]

Well, I. So I'm actually going to the Plaza Art Fair this weekend. So Kansas City has this, like, giant art fair that's on the country club Plaza once a year. And we had the Westport Art Fair a couple of weeks ago, which is a smaller one with more local artists. And I really enjoyed just kind of, like, meeting some of the artists and, like, looking at paintings. And I don't know if I told you, Chuck, I'm taking. I've now. I'm now taking professional lessons. I found an artist in town. He's actually an oil painter, but he deals with acrylic. Even though, you know, begrudgingly deals with acrylic. There's a thing to that level. Yeah, he lowers himself to the acrylic paint level. But I'm learning a lot. And I've just been really enjoying time going to art fairs and kind of studying everything from how, like, how they're painting to even the setup of, like, their tents and how they lay things out and present things. And it's kind of one of my life goals to do one of these one day. Maybe not the Plaza Art Fair, because that's, like, pretty competitive and hard to get into, but, like a local one. So I went to the. The one I went to last week. I talked to a bunch of painters. I met a lot of great local people and learned about just, like, the whole process of doing a tent and how you hang things and lighting and what you do with. With the floor and just like, the whole business aspect of it, too, which is really interesting. So I'm just kind of looking forward to going to this larger art fair and looking at different painters and kind of studying that. It's like just studying the paintings I have found is really helpful for, like, learning new techniques and, you know, just getting ideas for how to try things out.

[Chuck Marone]

So, yeah, that's amazing. I would love to go with you and hear you talk about it, because I feel like this is a world that I don't understand. And I've seen the work that you've done, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is beautiful. It's genius. It's really, really good. You know how some people are, like, tone deaf and some people are colorblind? I'm not art deaf in the sense that I have no sense of what I'm looking at. But when I hear people who know the color, the texture, the technique, all that stuff, they will show me things that I like are just beautiful. And I. Yeah, I'm kind of deaf to that whole side of it.

[Abby Newsham]

And I would craft. I mean, there's all. I mean, I think everything is constantly, like, people will look at it and think like. Or they'll say, you know, they really like a painting. But I feel like I'm in a fight with all of them because each of them are this experiment of, like, using different materials. And, like, and I paint with charcoal and acrylic paint and charcoal. It doesn't affix to things. Right. You have to fix it. And so that's its own experiment of, like, well, what material do you use? And brushing it over and making sure not to mess up other aspects of it. And, you know, don't. Not blending things in a way you don't want to blend it.

[Chuck Marone]

So it.

[Abby Newsham]

Actually, it would be a lot easier if I just used black paint, but I don't. I like to paint with the charcoal. So, yeah, it. To me, it's. It's. What I think is fun about it is that it is this whole process of just experimenting with lots of materials. And that's what I see when I talk to. When I see other paintings or talk to the people who made them, like, they kind of have the same approach, that each one that they did is like, well, I was learning how to do this, and then I was trying this. And so it's fun to hear people's kind of walk through how they. How they got to each of the paintings. And it's not something I thought about until I started painting. And then you're like, oh, yeah. There is literally a process of learning the craft, and it's not even just about the subject. It's. There's so much that. There's so much that's beyond just the subject of what you're painting. It's more like how you're painting. And, yeah, I just have really appreciated that.

[Chuck Marone]

I have the same intensity of interaction when I go to places where people have baked cookies.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah.

[Chuck Marone]

Yeah.

[Abby Newsham]

It's kind of like cooking. Totally. It's like, it's all about process. It's not like, oh, I'm just, yeah, baking this cookie. And that's the subject, and it is what it is. It's like people who love baking, they love the process and seeing what the outcome is based on, like, taking little risks.

[Chuck Marone]

When I will watch, I will see what other people do from a baking standpoint. And I'll be like, oh, that's really, like, you just threw that together, like, not cool. And then I'll go, oh, my gosh, I never thought of doing that. That's really brilliant. And then I'll be like, how can I incorporate that into the baking that I do? And I'll Ask them questions like, how'd you get this just right? And they'll explain their technique. And, yeah, there is a certain. I find myself, like, crave, like, craving other people who do baking like I do, and just learning, you know, like, someone turned me on to the. Whatever that baking show is, and they're like, oh, you would love this. And I actually hate it, because all you get is. Is them, like, running around frantically. And then you get the end product, and then you get them being insulted by the judge. And I'm like, I don't care about any of those things. I care about, like. Like, I would watch them sift flour for 10 minutes if you just showed me, like, how are you doing that to get, like, exactly right? How are you mixing these spices together? So, yeah, that's. That's really, really interesting, Abby.

[Abby Newsham]

Yeah, if there was a show that was the same format but about painting, I would feel the same way. Like, it's. It is. What's interesting is the whole process of doing it. And that's why I think things like that are, like. They're very meditative, right? Because you're in present. Like, you are focused. You're trying something. It's, like, it's not about necessarily the end goal, although making cookies is a great having a cookie.

[Chuck Marone]

So here's. Here's my dream. Then. When you move to Minnesota, when you move to Brainerd, we will, every December, have, like, a retreat that we do where I will be in the kitchen baking. You will be, like, in the dining room or living room painting. And we will just have our, like, meditative time. And then we'll meet, and I'll share cookies with you, and we'll talk about how you painted. That would be a beautiful life. Like, that would make me really happy.

[Abby Newsham]

Well, why don't we do an incremental development project together and open up a storefront where a painting. And it's a bakery. Yeah, it's a bakery slash, like, art gallery and paint workshop space. Like, you go. Maybe you can go and take. You can take cooking classes and paint classes there. Right?

[Chuck Marone]

Well, I tell you, if this whole Strong Towns thing doesn't work out, that's what we'll. That's what we'll do.

[Abby Newsham]

Just throw it away. This is what our colleagues. It's all led to this moment. This is what you're doing now. Okay. Have a lovely weekend, Chuck. I'll talk to you later.

[Chuck Marone]

Thanks. You, too. Go, Brainerd Homecoming.

[Abby Newsham]

Go, Brainerd Homecoming.

[Chuck Marone]

Tonight's the Warriors. Yeah, the big game. So I was able to fly back and be here in time for the game, which I'm really happy about.

[Abby Newsham]

So, yeah, good for you. All right, well, have a lovely weekend and thanks, everyone, for listening to another episode of upzone.

[Chuck Marone]

Let me show you what I'm about to do I'm about to get up Hit the town tonight oh, we're about to get down tonight Hit the town tonight oh, we're about to get down tonight get out Hit the town tonight oh, we're about to get down tonight Hit the it down tonight get out.