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Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems, learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithThyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to ConversationsWithThyler. Today I am speaking with design expert Roman Mars. He is the host and creator of the podcast 99% Invisible, which he describes as a sound-rich, narrative podcast, and it's about the unnoticed architectural and design choices that shape our world. It is one of the most listened to podcasts and it now has over 500 million downloads. He also has an excellent book, the 99% Invisible City subtitle, A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, also with Kurt Colstead. Roman, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. That's a pleasure to be here. I have many design questions for you. I hope I have designing answers for you. This I think is a hard one because I found it hard. But where do you think in the world the street signs are the most attractive? What makes them that way? Oh, my lord. I don't know if I know a good answer for this. I be happy to hear your answer. What I find mostly as I'm getting older is that the most beautiful street signs are the ones I can see the best. I'm always confounded by the fact that especially as a pedestrian, street signs are often the vantage point that they're really concerned about is a driver versus a walker. As a walker, you'll find that the street sign is sort of placed before the intersection. It's sort of for the driver approaching and that you'll be on a corner and you'll be looking around New York. I don't know where I am. Because it's a little bit behind you. So yeah, I don't know if I have a favorite like really beautiful one in particular, but I do love a really good grid, like a street that you know how to navigate without too much looking at your phone. That makes me very happy. But I also love to get lost in the sort of alleys of Venice too. And you just have to just like forge ahead and you'll get there eventually. Venice has good street signs, but for size, I would go with Los Angeles. Yeah, they're quite exciting. They're exciting for drivers. Yeah. I think for quality, most people would say some mix of Spain and Portugal, which have these ceramic themes, but they're not my favorites. They would be classic choices. Yeah, but they're the other really quite beautiful. There's no abundance of luck of good choices. But to me, it's a more autistic Switzerland where there's just like the name and a color and there's like blue and green and it tells you, you know, how big a street or highway it will be and everything is dark and it's in this very Swiss font. So that's my personal favorite, but I don't think it would win a poll. Well, it just matters if it works for you. Here's another question I've thought about. Why is it that older cars, maybe most classically from the early 1960s, but not only there's so much more attractive than today. Today, so many cars or SUVs, they look literally the same, right? Yeah. They're so boring. They're not offensive, but in the aggregate, maybe they're offensive. And what happened? This is croak confounding to me. I've talked to a lot of industrial designers and designers over the years and cars are often the way they got into design, caring about design as kids, like it's the first thing they ever noticed and really loved and cared about. And a lot of it has to do with, you know, those forms that are we're so bold that you could sort of, you know, it's a game on the highway where you could look ahead of you and from the just the shape, you could say what model and make of car, maybe what year of car it was so distinctive. And now I think you could do that at all as a game. You know, I think that there's like kind of boring and plain reasons for this, which are just like energy resources and things like we put a lot of steel on a ceremony and cars during our sort of extractive phase of of manufacturing where we made a big and bold choices because we didn't care that the things got 10 miles to the gallon and the shapes of the of the fins and the and the structures were ridiculously unsafe for the people inside. So those get shaved down by sort of necessity and the sort of the needs of of the environment, the needs of society. And then I think that there's something about just like people, you know, kind of gravitating towards a mean and trying to mass produce something that appeals to the most number of people. And then it just sort of like begins to get increasingly more and more samey. And I do think it's a real shame. And the moments where there are these breakout moments of something looking really different, I have to admit, I don't really like them. This is really what they do. I think the soundtrack is horrible looking vehicle, but it but it looks a lot different mainly because it's utility is quite terrible. But yeah, it's it's a real risk to go far afield and try to create something brand new. But I think it's just sort of a there's a few pressures working to make things the same. Do you find Waymo's attractive because I do they look different, they look futuristic because of all the the gadgetry on it's almost satire how they look, but I enjoy it. I smile. Yeah, I mean, the I've never been in a Waymo. This is my own personal thing. I have a recurring my one recurring nightmare. This is like getting very personal very fast, but my one recurring nightmare is when I'm very, very stressed is I'm in the backseat of a car with nobody driving and I'm trying to climb over to control the vehicle. And so I don't think that they're not made for me in that sense because I feel like if I was choosing to make that choice, but Waymo's seem very great. They also seem like very clear that robot driving cars way better than a human driving a car. So I have no problem personally with them. But do you think the nightmare goes away if you confront it? Maybe I think there's a chance of that, but it's definitely that it is my one recurring thing is like being in a speeding uncontrolled car and I have to climb over from the backseat to control it. Now I grew up in New Jersey where we have what sometimes called the Panhandle. Jug handles, yeah. Jug handles as a way of making left turns you go around and then through from the side. Do you feel we underuse those or should even New Jersey not have them? There's some good thought and efficiency built into Jug handles. The problem is is they really only work if you know they're coming. Like it just is like if you're familiar with the streets, it has a nice thing of avoiding long left turns that people waiting to make left turns. But if you don't know the street like I've driven around in Jersey a lot and it just is like you don't know if you should be on the left and the right. I'm kind of a driver who's like I like to be in the lane. I'm in very, very early. Like I don't like to, you know, and making rapid decision realizing that all of a sudden that you're going to have to make a right to make a left is something that also just really stresses me out. So like if it was consistently used and that there was never left, I'd be all for it. But it's the sort of inconsistency which I think is a little bit of a problem. But maybe no one really visits New Jersey, right? You wouldn't do it in California or Florida. We're plenty of people visit. That's true. It is definitely made for people in New Jersey. They don't even visit other parts of New Jersey unless it's what they call the New Jersey Shore. And only in New Jersey do they call it the Shore, right? Not peeps, the Shore. That's right. And thus it may work there. I worried that it's the value of land goes up the jug handler panhandle. It takes up more land. It certainly does. What it's safe in time, like I just, you know, there's like UPS has algorithms where they make sure their drivers never make a left turn because it is just so inefficient and so bad for their routes. And I'm kind of of that belief. I'll go away around the block to make sure I'm not making a left in a place that I'm not confident making a left. And so I think the Shore panel does serve a real good purpose. It's just the amount that has to be telegraphed to a person not familiar with them means that it's utility is somewhat diminished. What do you think of the yellow lighting on our roads? When I was a kid that was a trend for a while, I never saw it take off. Is there any advantage yellow lighting like as an overhead instead of white. I don't really know what the advantage is. I haven't really thought about it too much. I think that getting things towards more natural light and less glaring light is important in terms of our sense of the world and sort of like how much we want to sort of like engage with the night sky and stuff like that. I think it's thoughtful in terms of light pollution. Mostly it's a good thing. I'm not quite sure in this case. Like I did interview a group of designers who had a company called Civil Twilight and it was all about making street lights, you know, a little bit more responsive, a little less glaring, allowing us to have a little bit more vision of the night sky in our cities. And I'm all for that type of thing. What color should the central stripe be on a road? On a road. Yeah, just white or I think the utility makes sense. And it's white on the outside. It's yellow on the inside if you don't want it to cross. It's like double line if you don't want to cross. That makes I think it's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty, you know, I like the cat size reflective, like little markers that I think help me out a lot. Again, as I'm like, my vision is not as good as it used to be. I really rely on these sort of retro reflective paints and different cats eye, like different things to make it so that I can see them. That's the most most important thing is being able to see them. If I think of small towns in New England, many are quite charming or beautiful. If I think of Houston, not that much of it is attractive to me. Yeah, Houston is growing pretty rapidly. And the small towns are shrinking. How should I interpret that trend? You know, Houston is a place famously with no zoning laws whatsoever. I mean, that does create a type of growth that is valuable to some. I think it has its limits. I mean, what it does is create car culture, which is, I think, I think, a net negative to only sort of build a city around a car. But if it's a net negative, why is everyone moving there, or like Northern Florida, which is also car culture, growing rapidly in population? Yeah, I mean, when you ease those burdens of growth, growth is easier. I think that's pretty clear. And then when growth is easier, cost is down. And it's all about making choices. I think that there's going to be a group of people that find that to be like perfectly great and perfectly, like that's the world that they want, and there's enough populist in the United States and a heterogeneity of like what they care about, that'll be attractive. And then there'll be places where that's not attractive. But there's definitely enough population to support it, regardless. And so it's fine that they have a place to go for sure. But can you see a world coming, just say in the United States, where actually where people live becomes more attractive on average? And we build new things, maybe in different styles, but they're attractive as small New England towns might be attractive. And the country overall, the living structures become more beautiful. Is there a path toward that, or is that just impossible now? No, it's impossible. I do think that these, you know, these things change in our sense of them of what is attractive and what isn't, modifies over time. I do think there's real care and design in new structures. I've definitely seen them in places that I've visited. I mean, there's places in, I was in New York recently. And even I think the best example of this is London, which has a lot of historic buildings and the integration with the new modern buildings, often inside of the same building, is gorgeous. Like really, really well done. And there's a way to do it so that there's a kind of harmony amongst these things. And I think it has to do with the trends and cities and what they're going for. Like there's always a habit of care that is retained. Like when you go to Chicago and you see all the skyscrapers, like all the skyscrapers, there was like a onus on each of the different architectural firms to have the skyscrapers talk to each other, even across decades. And I think it was a cultural thing, not just about money or economics or something like that. I think there was just like a sense that Trump International Hotel, it had these like different levels. And it like one of those levels is the exact same height as the wriggly building. The next level is the next height of the next building around it. Like it has these things that like speak to the area that speak to beauty. And I think there's something about them that there's a culture of that that can be retained and brought forward. And I think it's present. And I think there's definitely ways to make things beautiful, continue to make things beautiful. But say is there any residential neighborhood, take just the United States, post-World War II, that you would say is beautiful, and the same way you would say shake our heights is beautiful, or some suburbs of Chicago are beautiful, because I can't think of one, frankly. Okay. I'm going to think about beautiful suburbs. Now, I would say parts of Copenhagen are quite new and beautiful, parts of Helsinki, but it does not much in the Western world, and in the US I can't think of anything. I don't know if I can think of something off the top of my head like that. But you know, you're a design expert, I'm not criticizing you, I'm agreeing with you. What has gone wrong with us? What's your account of this? I mean, I think it's just sort of about what people want. I think a little bit of the sort of cohesion and sort of harmony of a place. You have to do with proximity and putting things close together and people noticing, and when you have places that are further apart, like buildings, even just houses that are further apart, and you have the pressures of industrial manufacturing and always trying to make. I mean, housing is one of those things that economists and people thinking about, I've always tried to make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and in a way it kind of has a speed of light that they can't quite crack because buildings is local, you know, like they try to make things more modular, they try to make it a more cookie cutter, and at a certain point they just can't kind of break through a certain level. And I think I was talking to Steven Dubner from Freakonomics about this at one point, and we were discussing this idea, and I was like, I don't want building to get more efficient. I want it to be inefficient in ways, because I want people to make individual decisions, and I want local workers to be paid a certain amount of money, and so I think there's an impulse to push things to be more uniform, and I think in a way less beautiful, but there will always be those pockets where beauty and good design can be found. I think these things sort of shift back and forth in terms of what people care about, and just a matter of like, you know, funding the right collection of people that are willing to put up with it, it's sort of a level of inefficiency to sort of to pay for the beauty. Why wasn't the Chrysler building more popular at first? Well, you know, it leaned at a time period of the upswing of modernism, and you know, it has all these like what are considered, at the time we kind of garrish adornments, you know, like the silver hub caps and the eagles and things that evoke cars like the Chrysler. And so, you know, modernists that were in charge of the architecture critics at the time, you know, were like, oh, this is like silly filigree on this building. I think it's gorgeous. I love that building. But it's harsh criticism was kind of a victim of the era. But since then, I think it's, it's endured. And that's why it's great to have buildings around for a while to have them reassessed. And most of the buildings that I've ever done stories about have been reassessed like over and over and over again. So you just have to be there long enough. Do you enjoy brutalism? I do. You know, again, it's something that, you know, it can be done right or it can be done wrong. I think one of the things about brutalism, why it appeals to, you know, like architecture, fans like invested architecture fans and architects and is, um, I think in the abstract, I think the shapes and the forms are really beautiful, especially as a drawing. I think what brutalism fails is that it doesn't age particularly well because the way the concrete aggregate can fall apart, it can get cracked, it can feel heavy and kind of intense. And so there's places where that brutalism form, you know, makes things just oppressive and feel inhuman and there's places where it feels extremely human and lovely. I love the barrican in London. I think there's a functionality to that place that's really gorgeous and the shapes of it are gorgeous. And so you can do it well and then you can do it in ways that are shocking to people. Which do you think are cities that do a good job incorporating greenery? Hmm. I mean, I think that all of them have gone through phases where they really cared and will they haven't. I mean, the one of the things I think about when it comes to like New York City in particular, I just think that everyone should take a minute all the time to recognize the miracle of Central Park, you know, like that it was held off, like the most expensive real estate in the world probably for much of its time and existence was held off to create this space for people and that that place was revolutionized through homestead, revolutionized the sense of what we treat parks and how they speak to nature in a real way. It's just a stunning achievement to me and I think of that, you know what, I live in the Bay Area, Golden Gate Park. Similarly, the existence of it is kind of stunning to me. Would Paris be better if it had such a park? Because you'd be pushing out a lot of Parisians. Yeah, I mean, probably, it's when you make these decisions like long ago, it's easier to have, you know, value those decisions if you were to sort of like raise a whole neighborhood to the ground several blocks, it would be harder, you know, like ROI to calculate. But I do think that green spaces and public gathering spaces are extremely important to a city and when they don't have them, they suffer greatly for them. What did Jane Jacobs get wrong? There's a kind of dichotomy that people draw of sort of the Jane Jacobs versus the Robert Moses style of like bottom up versus top down. And I do think that Jane Jacobs sense of a city or neighborhood should and could be coming from the ground up is extremely astute and on the money, I think her sense of the sidewalk ballet and all those things are really important in their keen observations. I do think that they're taken to an extreme. There is a sense that there is no good from top down planning and I actually think that there is. I think that a functioning city operates both top down and bottom up and they both listen to each other and they make big plans and there's not a lot of room in the Jacobs world view in the extreme for top down plans that actually really do matter and are effective and make the world a better place. There can be a kind of historic preservationist streak in that anonymism inside of Jane Jacobs that could have a pernicious effect. It isn't present in her writing, but I think that there's the natural follow through has that potential. What would she have thought of e-bike lanes, which we now have a lot of in many places? I don't know. I mean, probably do they contribute to the sidewalk ballet? I'm going to guess. I'm going to say like a little bit no and a little bit yes. So I don't know how she would paint on e-bikes. It's a good question. And what's your view? Do they make city's uglier or more attractive? I would say uglier. The e-bike lanes in particular or just the e-bikes? I mean, I do think that there's, yeah, I mean, I think that streets do need to be reclaimed as a place of multimodal transportation and not just given over to cars. I think that's a good impulse. The street existed in human history as a place for humans and horses and, you know, like carts and eventually cars and then they were just only for cars. And you were at fault if you were a human inside of that street if anything went wrong. I think the making streets more flexible, more multimodal is a good impulse. I think the bikes are fine. I think the lanes are fine if as long as they work well, but I think they're important towards deconstructing the hegemony of a car. I think a car is a good thing, I have car. I like it. It's good in some environments. It's not a deal for cities in a lot of ways and so it's important to have different ways to break apart the mobility of a city. The land costs a lot. What do you think of the Tokyo and Japanese model where there's really very few bikes in that country? There's plenty of mass trash. there's lots of walking. Many of the streets are walking friendly. Bikes hardly play a role. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a little bit of the, you know, culture. I mean, the good thing is the pressure release valve that they created was an extremely effective and like beautiful public transit system. I love being in Tokyo. It makes me feel great, you know, because I just love the ability to get anywhere and do anything like that. And so if it serves that way, then that's great. But if we have a patchy network, then coming up with, you know, kind of cheap ways to get between them, whether it be e-bikes or really buses is also the secret to public transit that people don't sort of employ as much as they should probably because they're not as sexy as cool trains. Those types of things are I think are important to putting together a patchy network that isn't as devised as, as well as it could be. I sometimes hear the claim that internationally current design trends are leading us toward a kind of placelessness that these coffee shops look the same in Bangkok, Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aires. I'm not sure it's true, but what's your opinion? It's not obviously wrong, right? No, it's not obviously wrong. I don't think it's, you do feel it. I think there's another thing at work here, which is like, you know, a kind of corporate globalism does create like a brand a style and aesthetic that's carried over in places. And there can be a kind of a solaceness to that thing as it's sort of transported from place to place. But I think if you're an astute, you know, traveler and, you know, like observer of things, you notice the little differences of things. I mean, I'm not like a big McDonald's eater, but like, I do like to go to the local McDonald's to see whatever weird thing is on the menu that I've never seen before. And you can find these little nuances and strange things in places. And you can find them in your coffee shops and stuff. So there's a flattening of culture as you become more global. There's a flattening of accents as you become more global. There's a flattening of all kinds of things. So I think that's harder to deny. But I do think that those, the little differences are there in present and, and they're worth paying attention to. Now, when the iPhone first came out and I bought one on day one, I thought it looked quite beautiful. And now to me, it looks quite boring. I changed. Did it change? Am I just too used to it? Is it gotten worse? What's your opinion? I think you've just gotten used to it. Style trends in what we care about in design, they do evolve. You do get bored of seeing the same thing. And there's an impulse to change. It's just like when we talked about with the Chrysler building. I mean, the idea of like that ornamentation, feeling of the old era. And people just loving the sleekness of these new modern skyscrapers. And loving that just like the whole utility of them. And the utility represented the form. And they just like, they were in love with that. And they were in love with that for kind of good reasons. And I think mostly good reasons when you grow up in a world in which ornamentation is reserved for the lucky few. And everyone else gets nothing. Like all of a sudden, ornamentation seems like offensive. So you see this thing and you go, "God, it's so beautiful. The function is so lovely. You can give it to a chimpanzee." And they'll know how to use an iPhone. It's a stunning achievement in design. And then you get used to it. And you're like, "You know what? A button would be nice here or something." I think the new one seems to be like the clamshell. So it opens up like a phone and gives you more real estate. But it's seamless looking. And I think that that seems to be the next one I see. You know, people being into. And for a while, that'll seem very futuristic. I remember the first cell phone I got was another first one. But one of the early ones where I was like picking something out because of its beauty was a Motorola razor phone. And I just was like, this sleekness of it, I thought was just like stunning, honestly. Trans change and people will adapt to that so it is. They're more robust now. You can drop them, even throw them, put them under water. They're fine. I worry that maybe they look less sleek in the service of robustness. Now I would prefer their robustness, in fact. But I think I would err towards robustness rather than sleekness as well. But yeah, I mean, the funny thing about the phone is that it's like a, is that being a phone is this leads to important quality. It's like, it's like what you need out of a pocket computer versus what you need out of a phone are completely, I think are different things and they're diverging more all the time. So as the functionality of the iPhone is quite wide, which is why the screen is so nice for dealing with all that different functionality, you'll see things differentiate as you want them to be more of one thing versus another. Like you see, there's a minor trend of people like ditching smartphones for what they would call dumb phones, which function kind of better as a phone, where the phone is the primary function that you're trying to create for. As you add more functionality, these things will start to split into different devices, maybe again. So you can never know. What's the ugliest country you've been to? (laughs) My goodness. (laughs) Ugliest country. I don't have a candidate for ugliest country, countries are really different. I was in Bali recently. And Bali is beautiful. Okay, there's like a beautiful, lovely place, beautiful, lovely people. But I was in some of the cities so much of getting around is on little bikes and motorcycles and stuff and I'm a walker. And it is very hard to get around walking in different cities in Bali and you're pushed to the, like the gutters are right there. They're often like a cut in the ground. You know, like it's pretty dangerous. You can be forced into them. And there's just an assault on your senses and a constant vigilance that's required to get around. And that felt ugly to me when I was there in parts of the country. Other parts of the country was like, you know, it's a gorgeous, amazing place. You know, so it was that lack of care for the type of person who doesn't have a car or doesn't have a driver. I found that ugly, uglier than I wanted it to be. Riyadh Saudi Arabia is quite ugly to me. It doesn't have the excuse of being poor, right? Very poor countries. Well, they just can't do certain things. But Riyadh is just awful, I felt. I've never been there. So I'll take your word. You should go for this reason. It's experienced uglyness first. Yes. One of my favorite topics, currency design. What's your favorite currency in terms of how it looks? I love almost any of them with the US currency like in dead last. So it's kind of like hard. Like I find like things to love. I've done a story on Australian currency, which was one of the early polymer notes. I just like utility and currency. I like different sizes. I like different colors. I like the fact that they put on artists and people of note that are not founding fathers and presidents and stuff like this. I don't know if I have a particular favorite. I was sort of entranced by the thoughtfulness and utility of Australian currency when I did a story about it. You could be blind and know what note you're holding because of the size. They stand up pretty well and they care about all kinds of things rather than just presidents and stuff. I loved Swiss currency pre-2021. They had the Corbusier on Chacumedi, a Honeger. In the 1980s, they had Euler on the mathematician. Imagine putting Euler on your country's currency. I mean, that is a canvas that's so available to us to represent more values than we have in the United States than just founding fathers and presidents and stuff. And I think it's just such a wasted opportunity. I like the dollar though. I'm surprised you're so negative. I like the weird esotericism. The eye, the pyramid, the design is bizarre. There's toutes in the world. We're crazy. I mean, there are things to love about it. I just think that it has a kind of fassiness and filigree were kind of locked in. I think for important reasons, which is because the dollar is the most important currency in the world, which all other currencies are pegged. And therefore, you don't change it lightly. You have to be very, very careful. But it really locked it into amber in a way that is like both beautiful to admire, but also really limits its utility as like things move on. Like we get better things than linen paper, hybrids, and especially different sizes and utility for people with different needs. I think that's important. But there's definitely things to love about the dollar. It's all our has some charm. I like the arrogance of it also. A sense of, we don't need to make the denominations look so different. If you're a foreigner, we expect you'll come here a lot. You'll master dollars. Maybe you use them in your home country as well. You know, they don't need to be different colors. It is definitely a bold statement that you're going to adapt to our way of being. If you're going to use the dollar for sure. Should America put its power lines underground? Probably, yeah. Yeah, I mean, especially in this world of climate change and more fires. I mean, like some of the biggest fires in California were started by down power lines. And that wouldn't happen if they were underground. And so that would be really useful. I think it's also just like, would be prettier. I like it when they are underground. Again, it's mainly sort of a cost benefit if you can make it work. I mean, one of the things that is good is, you know, that you can run a power line to something and you can put something up pretty quick. And that's an amazing thing that we have a network grid like that. And if everything had to wait for a channel to be dug underground, I think things would be harder to build and buildings of premium importance. So it's really a matter of balancing those things. How should we signal especially large speed bumps in the road? Think issue in Virginia where I live. Really? You just run across them and then hit them too hard? I live in the suburbs. Over time, the number of them goes up. The size of them goes up. It rarely goes down, right? It's an asymmetric process. And you don't always know what's coming. Yeah, I mean, signage, I think we get immune and blind to signage after a while. I think the road markers, like when you have like the chevrons that go over them, help some indication. But I don't think they really give you a full sense of what it is. I think your unbalanced and unshoreness is almost their goal to make you a not certain how to go over them. And so therefore you go over them very, very slowly. Or you could say I go over them pretty quickly because I know it's not a credible warning. The incentive is to put up that it's really big and then not have it be that big, you know. But uncertainty seems to be that it's coal, which is important in traffic devices sometimes. Uncertainty is a good thing because it makes people more cautious, so far. Traffic circles do that. Traffic circles, for example. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm a big fan of traffic circle and it's all built on anxiety. This is a central principle. How should we signal the presence of atomic waste? Knowing it will still be there, thousands of years from now or however long. What should we put up that people will understand in the distant future? This is a real conundrum because there's this chance that no language or warnings would make sense. There was a project of this, the WIP program, to figure out like how to sort of signal people that are basically almost non-human and serve their evolution in terms of like what, to warn them against these things. And they ran into this problem, like this seems very fundamental and sort of hard to conceive of, but even like putting a pictogram of like a person, they run into a contact of radioactive material, and then the next, you know, like a three-panel comic strip of like a person who's healthy, running to radioactive material, and the next panel shows them sick or dying. Like we don't even know if people will perceive a left-right orientation in our pictures. So you really have to come up with novel ways to make these things persistent over time. And people thought about creating folk songs. They thought about putting radioactive responsive markers and animals and releasing them. So like radioactive cats. So they would like, if they were, if a cat was around radioactive material, they would glow, and then build a folk tradition around it. The glowing cats are things to avoid. And maybe that persistent story would last over millennia. I mean, it's an interesting and confounding problem, but people came up with really creative solutions. I mean, I think it's evidence by what, you know, we did when we discovered different tombs in Egypt and stuff. There's no amount of warning that will stop a person who's determined to get into a place, even if it seems intimidating or has traps or whatever it is, you know, like it just makes us more motivated. So it's an actual problem to think about for sure. Or you might think there's some kind of treasure they are, and they're trying to scare you off because it's valuable. Exactly. Exactly. There's no way to convey, like, 100% what you mean, because places that are protected, yeah, it seemed like there's something valuable behind it. In this case, there's nothing valuable. I've related problems. When you're coming off the highway, as you well know, typically you have to go more slowly on the ramp. And if you ought to be going, say, 40 on the ramp, they'll tell you you ought to be going 25. Should they just tell us the truth? Or should they systematically lie to us and say 25, even though 37 might be okay? Yeah, I don't know. That type of very early on in my driving career, I kind of learned that 10 miles above this just limit was kind of what they were going for. Yeah. I think there's some utility in me figuring that out and doing the math. As I become a better driver or more confident driver or know the road, it's better. That is that serves some purpose. It's just that that purpose, like this sort of intention and the effect are kind of hard to calculate. So would it be better to tell people the truth? Another rule is to double the number and subtract 10. Yeah. That's more ambitious. I mean, I just do think that there's a certain amount. A lot of driving, at least devices and driving in general, like on the highway in particular, is all designed around calming your brain so that you will go that fast because humans are not evolved to go that fast. So if you were to get out on a highway and stand next to a sign, most people marvel at the size of a highway sign. They have no idea that it's really that big. And part of that and the dashes in between lanes, most people estimate that a dash and a dividing line of a highway is two feet long when in fact they're 10 to 15 feet long. And it is all there to calm your brain at going at high speeds so that you can go very fast and have it not freak you out. So when you're going to transition of like tricking people's brains into going very fast so that a highway functions, you have to do things that sort of like shock people out of their hypnotic state to get them into a different driving mode. And so an artificially low speed limit or suggested limit, it makes some sense to do it that way. But also like as people begin to game it and know that what's going on, obviously it starts to feel kind of ridiculous. You have a very famous TED Talk on city flags and what makes for a good city flag. And you've propagated the term "vexalology," the study of flags. Why should there be no lettering on flags? City flags, that is. Because a flag is meant to be flying on a pole and so it should be effectively work from backwards and forward. So it's just because it has a backside that you can see and so it's not good. But what about the other perspective that outsiders never see flags? Like I've been, I think, to the 50 largest American cities. Often repeatedly, there's not one city flag I could identify from any one of them until I saw your talk. But you could identify Chicago flag. If you know I could, I absolutely couldn't. Oh, it's everywhere in Chicago. So maybe the purpose of the flag is to signals to interest groups internally that they're respected by the city or the mayor or the government. And then you want some lettering. It looks ugly, but who cares? So my contention in that talk was like a little bit I was just kind of making fun and having fun with the idea of the design of flags. In general, what I was discovering as I was thinking about this was that when cities have good flags, they use them well and they're very, very useful as a municipal device. And Chicago was one of those examples where the Chicago flag is displayed like everywhere and different elements of it are taken apart and presented. And it actually, like, reinforces and feeds Chicago pride in I think a meaningful and an important way. And so when you're in a place where that has an effective flag, usually because it adheres to these sort of guidelines that Ted Kay laid out in his vexalology handbook, it sort of has this positive reinforcement effect, this positive feedback loop of having pride in a city. You display a good looking flag. You want to display it because it's good looking. It gives you more pride in a place and it has this nice effect. I think that's useful and good. And the way to make a good design flag is to follow basic principles this way. But if you can love a flag that has lots of colors and it's really busy and has words on it, and that gives you the same amount of pride and has the same amount of utility, absolutely fine. I'm like, I'm not there to police that part of it. I was just sort of giving people the idea of the tools to make a flag loved because it is a underused thing in a city to sort of rally around to give people pride other than, you know, sports teams on their corporate things. Like this is the thing that we all own. It's a piece of design and branding that is a lovely thing to embrace. If it's beautiful enough to embrace and so that that's the pathway to it is to sort of to make it so that it works in a lot of instances and taking words off of this is one of the things that I think I think is a good idea. I think it makes for a cleaner, more beautiful thing. But you know, there's examples in which I mean mostly words I don't like it all, but like there's examples in which things that violate flag rules in lovely and amazing ways that I think it's really beautiful. Like I think in Maryland's flag is really beautiful and it is held sort of back to heraldry of the, you know, like Lord Baltimore and Calvert and it's super busy and looks like a racing flag and I think it's the most gorgeous. I think it's super gorgeous, you know, so you can do it lots of ways. The Brazilian flag, you know, it's order me progress, so order and progress, which sometimes has taken almost satirically, but I quite like it. I think the Brazilian flag is great and that's another place like where they really embrace it and that's really it. Like my goal or my, my hope for places is just that recognized flags can be really beautiful. They're a worthy effort to make them so and they're worth lauding and flying. If you, like I have a flagpole at my house, I love putting out flags for various like independent stays around the world and various things that are happening in my life. If we want to visit someplace, I'll sometimes put a flag up beforehand and I just think they're great and worth sort of like spending some time thinking about and if it has little words on it, so be it like Brazilian flag is this amazing flag. You almost convinced me that Pocatello Idaho has the best flag in the country rather than the worst. I agree with everything you say about it, but there's otherwise no chance you and I would be mentioning Pocatello Idaho, right? Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I went there to talk them about their flag, so I called them out as having the worst flag. I mean, the Navaservic identified as the worst flag in the country and I called them out in this Ted talk. I was really just kind of fun with it and they got in touch and they wanted to redesign the flag. And in the truth of the matter is that flag, it was only official flag in sort of the most bare sense. Like it was a branding that meant for municipal cars and things like that and then they put it on a flag and they presented it as their official flag, but it wasn't made for that. There's evidence that it wasn't made for that because it has like a trademark symbol on it and there's things on it that you wouldn't put on a flag, but it was put on a flag. And then I went to visit them as they were doing a redesign and I met one of the sort of city leaders and he was like, he was like, I have to thank you for this because it would be the worst. If we were the second worst flag in the country, then that would be so much worse than being the absolute worst because then we have motivation to change and we had people talking about it and it was really fun and the process figuring out a new flag was so much fun and they had a really good spirit about it. I was very grateful and they took it really well and I'm really not no harm, but it was a fun kind of moment in the talk. And since then, I mean, since that TED talk has been out, there have been something in Something in the neighborhood of 50 or 300. a hundred municipal flag redesigns in the country. And I think it was just like this moment to just like take a look at our place, know that we're part of this thing and make something that we're proud of. And even if with the end of it, they go, you know what, we love the thing that we had. That's totally fine. I'm happy with it. But I like that people were thinking about it in terms of a city. 'Cause I like that as an organizing principle of people's lives and their sense of pride. You know, like I love sports too, but like over sports teams, our office is no cleanse, our office was no cleanse downtown for a long time. And like, you know, our sports teams like left, you know, so it's like you can count on Oakland to be Oakland, but you can't necessarily count on the A's being here or the Warriors playing in the stadium here, so. - How well designed is your own studio by your own account? - My own studio. - Your own studio. - I like it. There's a little closet that was meant to be a utility closet in my house. And then they realized they could put the water heater, you know, somewhere in a crawl space in another part of the house and they had it kind of open. And as soon as I was touring it when I was going to buy it, I was like, I walked in. I was like, I know exactly what this room is going to be. And so it became my studio kind of instantly. And so I have this, it's called CityScape, this audio dampening kind of material that me and my stepdaughter put up over a couple of days. And then I have, I actually have still images that's the cover of my book, but it's like done in a soft scape. So it dampens the sound and I love my studio. It's great. Standing desk, so I stand all day. It's perfectly meant for me. It's, my house is not like the greatest place to put a studio inside of because it's a pretty open plan house. And I have a wife and six children live here or at least they did when they mostly lived here. Now they mostly live in colleges around the country, but I can hear everything in the house. So it's not perfect in that sense. But if they turn on a faucet in the kitchen, I can hear it. But other than that, I love my studio, it's great. - What do you think are the advantages of doing a podcaster radio show about visual objects? But the show itself is audio only. - Yeah, it has to do with overcoming people's biases. If I show you a building, I think you have a reaction to the building because of what you're exposed to and what you like and don't like and for all kinds of reasons and good and bad. But if I could tell you the story of a building, I can make you fall in love with it and then you see it. And then all of a sudden you see the merits. Usually in its function over your initial sort of take on its aesthetics. And I think there's something about when I was developing the show like 16, 17 years ago, I was really into that idea of telling the story of design versus having people react to the visuals of design and that it told a different story. That was nice and needed to be told about intentionality and the things that we make and do and surround ourselves with. - Now you've been extremely productive and for a long period of time in the worlds of podcast, radio and also writing. What do you think is your most unusual, successful work habit? - Huh, unusual. So if you said, oh, I wake up early every morning, not everyone does it, but it's not unusual, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think what would be unusual. I mean, I guess when I think about what I am most proud of, I love being a producer and a producer, what I love about it is it means everything. Like there's stages of your job in life in which you're just like, you're cutting tape or you're writing stuff or you're reading stuff. There's times when you're trying to solve a problem of what goes on the next episode. And as my career developed, I became a producer, my job was to keep a cohort of people happy and productive and managing them in a way that was where their talents are brought forward. I loved solving the problem of funding the show and make sure everyone got paid and all sorts of, so all those things that I think people think they'll go like, well, was it bad when you, you know, no longer had to do stories and you ran a business and I was like, I kind of loved it. I kind of loved each part of it. So I think the unusual part is I think I was very much like a leaf on the wind when it came to what my job, how it changed over time and being very content in each of those roles. And I think that's the key to my success is like taking what is going on in the world, adapting to it, and really thinking about solving the problem of putting a show on the air every week and thinking of it as a total problem. Like the no part of it is like outside of my scope, no part of it is too small to bear attention. I think that's it, but I don't think that's unusual necessarily, but that's, I think that's kind of the secret to my success. And the other part of my success is I try to lead with kindness first and I, the people who work with me, Delaney Halls are senior editor on an API. Like I hired Delaney out of college in 2005 and we've worked together in different parts and she's gone to another show and come back and I think I've created a culture where the people together work together are kind and tender with each other. And I think that I think it's really, really important to making a thing because we make thing that's an expression of art and what we care about and what we notice in the world. And I think that only is achieved when people's personalities are there and they're feeling their best and they're feeling supported. - Great answer, Roman Mars, thank you very much. - Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @tylercowin and the show is @cowinconvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.