transcript

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Speaker 1:
[00:28] Terms apply are covered to repairs. You're listening to the Talking Headways Podcast Network. This is Talking Headways, a weekly podcast about sustainable transportation and urban design. I'm Jeff Wood. This week we're joined by Tom Flood, Grant Ennis, and Brent Toderian to discuss their new communications project, The Urban Truth Collective. We discuss pushing back on falsehoods and conspiracies through positive messaging around cities. Stay with us. Today's podcast is brought to you by our super amazing and kind Patreon supporters. We appreciate y'all keeping this show and Mondays at The Overhead Wire going. To join this merry band of subway crayonistas and city smarties, go to patreon.com/theoverheadwire. $2 a month gets you some stickers and a handwritten note sent with a cool train station stamp. $10 a month gets you one of our transportation scars. If you want to just give a single dollar a month, you'll be able to get the podcast with zero outside ads or podcast recommendations in Patreon. We'll leave information in the show notes about how to do it and how to get it into your podcatcher. We've also recently put up some bonus material and have weekly free posts from our newsletter intro, so check it out if you haven't already. Speaking of scarves, it's still winter, so get your heavyweight bus or bike scarves. You definitely need one for you, your friends, your colleagues, and for the anti-bus activists, you just want to frustrate. If you want to get one of the bus or bike scarves or lightweight bike scarves for hot climates, visit theoverheadwire.com or support us on Patreon. There are many other ways to support the show, including buying books from the Bookshop site, either the books from the authors we interview, or any book you like, bookshop.org.shop.theoverheadwire.com and find our Cars Are Cholesterol merch at bit.ly.carsarecholesterol.com. For anything else, including the Town Planning and Practice audiobook that plays like a podcast, visit theoverheadwire.com. You can also get that podcast from Libby at your public library. And finally, definitely sign up for the now 20-year-old daily newsletter at theoverheadwire.com established in 2006 and our over 100,000 item link archive tagged by Topic and City. We'll leave a YouTube explainer video in the show notes for that one as well. Or you can just keep listening and enjoying the show. We appreciate that too. You can find us mostly on Bluesky and Mastadon, sometimes on Threads, Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, Substack, and LinkedIn if you want to connect, usually at The Overhead Wire, but with Flickr, it's called Transit Nerds. We've got some great stuff coming up in our 13th year of the podcast, so keep on listening for announcements, but for now, just enjoy the show. Hey everybody, I decided to move this part of my thank yous up from the post credits to right here smack dab at the start because I do want to recognize the folks who are Dallas tier or higher Patreon supporters. It really helps us out and we super appreciate it. When I get new supporters, I'll update this section, so I hope that happens often. First names only, but big thanks to Andrew, Ben, Derek, Gabriel, Glenn, Greg, James, Jeremy, Jim, Joseph, Catherine, Mal, Marcus, Matthew, Mike, Nicholas, Abraham, Oliver, Steve, Abby, Ed, Matthew, Sylvia, and recently added Andrew A. All right. Thank you all very much. Let's get to the show. Brent Toderian, Tom Flood, and Grant Ennis, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast.

Speaker 3:
[03:40] Hi, Jeff.

Speaker 4:
[03:41] Hello. Thanks for having us, Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[03:43] Yeah, of course. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves? We'll start with Tom and Grant, and then get to Brent, who joined us about 10 years ago in episode 112 as well. So we have some of your background. That was 10 years ago that we chatted on the podcast.

Speaker 3:
[03:55] Wow, I can't believe that was 10 years ago.

Speaker 1:
[03:58] We'll start with Tom, and then Grant, and then Brent.

Speaker 3:
[04:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:01] So Tom Flood, parent number one, as I always like to preface things. And I run a kind of a boutique marketing agency that's really focused on kind of reframing the mainstream narrative around road safety, road violence, and active transportation.

Speaker 4:
[04:17] And I'm Grant Ennis. I'm the author of Dark PR, How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and Environment, which has a large focus on urbanism and transport throughout the book, and discusses how corporations really work to make our streets left safe both in their actions and their rhetoric.

Speaker 3:
[04:38] And I'm Brent Toderian. So 10 years ago, Jeff, I would have been four years out of City Hall as the former chief planner for Vancouver, four years into my practice, which is Toderian Urban Works. And probably in the intervening 10 years, I've been doing a lot more work internationally. I've been advising cities as far away as Reykjavik, Iceland, and Auckland, New Zealand, and a lot of North American cities too. And I also co-curated just last year a really cool exhibit at Paris City Hall on climate action in the form of Better City Building, partnered with Mayor En-Hidalgo in Paris. And that was pretty fun. And all of that is actually indicative of a kind of a growing impatience and frustration I've been having with the need for better communication. I've joked, and it's not a great joke, that I might have stopped learning about better city building years ago. But what I've been obsessed about learning is better communication, more persuasive communication that sort of breaks through noise and actually changes the minds of decision-makers, changes the perspective of the public, et cetera. And increasingly, that's started to focus on aggressively, unapologetically calling out the lies and disinformation because you can't just tell the truth persuasively, you've got to call out the lies. And then as I have been leaning more and more into that unapologetically, I've observed, you know, the people who were within the profession, but also outside the practice of city planning and city building, the people who are the good communicators in the sphere of better cities. And saw Tom, who is a unicorn, this former ad exec that used to use his superpowers for evil, helping car companies and now is using them for good. I don't know, Tom, if you like the way I phrased that. To me, it's kind of like a superhero origin story, which I think is really cool. And Tom's a cool guy by nature. And does some really great work. And I'm sure you follow him on social media. Most people do. Because he's putting it out in a way that normal people understand. And then I run across probably the best book in the conversation about disinformation, which is Dark PR that Grant wrote and reached out to Grant. And he and I started to get to know each other. And I started to think about the Venn diagram of the three of us. I come at communication from practice and they come to the practice of cities from communication, and in Grant's case really, really good research. And you know, that overlap was super interesting. And maybe the origins of something new. So I pitched to the guys this idea of what we eventually called The Urban Truth Collective, to sort of break wide open the serious need for better communication, not just better ideas, but better communication of ideas and calling out the lies and disinformation. So that became The Urban Truth Collective. And we launched that about two months ago now. And it's just hit the ground running. We're going full steam ahead. We're building the airplane as we fly it. We've grown from the original three white guys that we are to an increasing number of collaborators that add a lot of diversity of perspective and professionalism and lived experience. So as we say, we were designed to grow and we leaned in on that growth. And that's been really exciting. But so far, we're just doing really great work and putting out a lot of really interesting content.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] Awesome. You answered like four or five of my questions already. I love it, but I want to go back in time a second before The Urban Truth Collective came together. And this is a question for listeners specifically, because there's a lot of younger listeners who listen to the show and they want to know where people came from and how they got interested in cities. And the reason why is because not all of us come to this place, the same way. We don't all come through planning school, we don't all come from an engineering program, we don't all come that way. And the kind of winding way that people get to where they are is interesting and allows people to know that they can do the things that you're doing even if they don't have the formal background generally of a planner. So I'm curious, Tom, Grant and Brent, what was your first kind of thoughts about cities or like, were you always interested in them like when you were a kid? And then what brought you to the space initially?

Speaker 2:
[09:00] Sure, I can start. I had zero interest in cities. I grew up in the suburbs, but then as soon as I could, I moved to Toronto, which was the thing to do when you're a young person. And yeah, I cycled, walked transit to my job, to gigs, to bars, everything you kind of do in your kind of early 20s while working in advertising. And I really didn't have an interest. I love being in the city, but I didn't have any sort of insight into cities. I don't come from transportation, from planning, from academia, zero background in this space. But for me, what happened was when the two kids now who were a little bit older, but when I first took them out on their bikes to school, the kind of light bulb went off and I had my real moment of clarity about the imbalance that we have on our streets. And that's what really woke me up. And as soon as like a lot of people know this here is that as soon as you see it, you can't unsee what's out there and how we design our cities and plan our cities. So I started just sharing very casually like everybody does on social media. I was just venting as a parent that was annoyed that it was kind of complicated to get my kids to school walking and biking. And that kind of just snowballed into developing creative and content and just kind of went from there. But yeah, I have zero background in planning or engineering our cities. Probably most of your listeners have way better insight into how our cities work and transportation that works, you know, work than I do. I just kind of use the lens as a parent trying to move my kids to school. And then the idea that that was framed up as some sort of a radical thing when we would try to implement some safe systems measures is what really lit a fire under me being kind of framed as a radical for wanting kids to be able to get to school safely.

Speaker 1:
[10:38] And Grant?

Speaker 4:
[10:39] Just reflecting that you're in San Francisco right now. And I grew up in Palo Alto and in Oakland, and there's been a lot of coverage on John Forrester lately. Do you know John Forrester?

Speaker 1:
[10:50] Vehicular cycling, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[10:51] So John Forrester is actually from Palo Alto. And so I was thinking on this other podcast that we've done recently, and I didn't get a mention of it. As a kid in Palo Alto, cycling on the sidewalk, which is the only place you're allowed to cycle or was at the time, I remember being hit by cars twice.

Speaker 1:
[11:09] On the sidewalk?

Speaker 4:
[11:10] Like you know when you're trying to go be, you're crossing a street, you're not going to just go in circles around the block forever, right? You have to cross a street at a junction. And the cars just would speed through and try and do the California right-hand turn, I think it's called. And in both cases, yeah, they clipped me from behind, it could have been very serious. I just thought that's a city where John Forrester's idea is dominated and ended up with very little protection for kids or anybody on a cycle. So my childhood urbanism was that, the John Forrester childhood. And then I remember going to a place, Rancho Cordova, outside of Sacramento. And I remember calling a friend of mine on the phone vividly and leaving a voicemail saying this is the most dystopic place I've ever been. It's just non-stop cookie cutter houses as far as I could see. I don't remember seeing a single human being. And this urban sprawl that like Rancho Cucamonga is really the epitome of, and maybe there's a better example, but growing up in California with a lot of it, this urban sprawl really marked me. So when I started traveling for work and seeing that cities could be wonderful things where people can walk and thrive, I think that contrast of growing up in California and this, this like dystopian sprawl really shaped a lot of my thinking, I guess you could say.

Speaker 1:
[12:37] And Brent?

Speaker 3:
[12:38] So as the practitioner, I think two things that people guess about me that are wrong. They think my parents were lawyers or engineers, and they think that I got into city planning because I was obsessed with SimCity growing up, which admittedly it did pop up around my teenage years. And both of those things are wrong. My parents were originally struggling country music musicians, and my dad went on the road and was on the road all the time. And I would spend the summers traveling with my dad around cities and towns, and he would sleep all day because he played all night, and I would go out and explore the city, and I would find where the used bookstore was, and I would find where the interesting spots were. And I think what I was doing at the time was understanding the DNA of good cities and bad cities, even though I wasn't necessarily aware of that at the time. Plus, my parents were performers, and I often say that it's probably why it's in my DNA to be a bit of a performer, and to be very comfortable on stage because I was actually in the band. I was the drummer from five years old to 14. So, people are shocked when they hear that because they, I don't know why they think my parents were lawyers, because I don't think I sound like a lawyer, but they think that. And as for SimCity, I was not a SimCity nerd growing up. I was a Dungeons and Dragons nerd, but I would create city adventures instead of dungeons. I would create elaborate cities. I would design them. I would create the political structure, the administrative structure, etc. And I realized then that I didn't even know what city planning as a profession was. And then my 12th grade urban geography teacher in high school made us do an exercise on designing the perfect city. And I was, I got obsessed with it. I wanted to perfect it. It was actually a very rudimentary computer program where you would be graded each time you made changes. And I wanted to get to a hundred percent. And he explained to me that there was this profession called city planning. At the time I wanted to be a lawyer, ironically, and boy am I glad I didn't go that path. But I thought, well, this city planning undergraduate degree sounds like a good pre-law program for environmental law. And then I took the undergrad program and fell in love with it and never looked back. And so very counterintuitive approach to becoming passionate about what I do. But I kind of realized I was always passionate about it. Just back in my day when I was a kid, city planning was not a profession that was in the newspapers. It just wasn't. It was invisible as a profession. Even in when I was in school, it was invisible. Now it's very visible. People talk about it all the time. But back then, I almost stumbled across it and said, what's that? But I was passionate about cities. And I was realizing early on that I was figuring out what worked and what didn't work.

Speaker 1:
[15:39] Yeah. No, that's the same way that I kind of came about it too. It was like I took a geography class in college and I had a friend that sat next to me. He's like, you know, you can do this as a profession. I took a class called the Modern American City from a professor, Shane Davies, and really changed my brain a little bit. I do want to ask you all, you know, you mentioned obviously the Urban Truth Collective, which you formed. I'm wondering what the truth is in that Truth Collective? Like what's the North Star that you all kind of organize around in order to start thinking about how to push back on the lies and falsehoods?

Speaker 4:
[16:09] I think it's the sometimes inconvenient truth of the evidence for what actually works for good urbanism. It's not always going to be like something very, very sexy and appealing. Sometimes the truth is something relatively boring, like 15-minute cities being just excellent, excellent places to live, walking to get a beer or whatever you want from your house, not needing to drive. Some of it's going to be the need to get rid of some of the stuff that is shaping the cities we live in right now, like famously minimum parking requirements and these things. I think the truth is sometimes not very cool. Smart cities, for example, they are not the truth. They're not really a very good idea. Techno cities where everything runs with an app is really not great. Sometimes the truth is very much more basic.

Speaker 3:
[17:11] Grant's right. When we talk about truth, we talk about evidence-based, but we also talk about common sense because we refuse to let the populace steal that phrase from us. Because some truths really are common sense. 15-Minute City, for example, sounds brandy and technical, but it's really about, isn't it better to have more things nearby than having to drive everywhere? How more common sense can you get than that? We debated whether we should have the truth in our title because frankly, Trump may have ruined it by taking that word and using it in truth social and such. But one of the things we've specifically decided to do is we're not surrendering language. We're taking it back. We're taking back truth, we're taking back common sense, we're taking back these words that have been weaponized by the forces of disinformation and misinformation, and reapplying them to what makes a city more successful or not based on experience and expertise and evidence and common sense. Then we're telling it more persuasively and we're thinking a lot of the existing brands or the lack of brands. Grant mentioned Smart Cities. Smart Cities was a very interesting brand because it was a brand created by technological companies to sell stuff to city halls. That's what it was for. They started inviting me to speak at the conferences and I said, a smart city isn't how much technology you have, a smart city is whether or not you're doing smart things. If you're doing dumb things with smart technology, you're not a smart city. They didn't like me and they stopped inviting me to speak at their conferences. That's an example of branding with a sinister purpose a bit, if you can take the drama of that phrase. Whereas we're thinking about branding, we're thinking about marketing, this is about communication. We are not another organization that says, we know the right things to do. There's actually a lot of organizations out there like that. A lot of podcasts like yours that talk about that all the time. What we're emphasizing is the communication, the marketing, the branding piece of it. Because frankly, that's the key. In my experience, I've sat in more decision-making rooms than most human beings on the planet for cities. And it's the communication that wins. And that doesn't mean we don't need to know what we're talking about. But if you know what you're talking about, but you're bad at communication, you lose.

Speaker 1:
[19:33] So what was the conversation like when you first kind of sat in the same room together? I'm curious about that, about the origins of The Urban Truth Collective. Because I'm curious, like, how you decide to go forward and what you picked out as some of the problems. Maybe what are some of the things that you decided, well, this is what we need to do. You had mentioned even the decision to even have a certain word in your title. I'm curious about some of those initial sit downs where you're all chatting with each other and saying, we need to do this or we need to put this together because it's what we need to do.

Speaker 3:
[19:59] We even debated the word. We debated all three words in our title, Jeff. Was urban the right word? Were we leaving out communities like towns, et cetera? And was collective the right word? What does that raise in people's brains? And by the way, to answer your question, we've never physically all been in the same room together. This is a virtual world we live in now. I've been in the room with both of them. I'm not sure, Tom and Grant, if you've been in the room together and all three of us have not been in a room together. And we've done everything virtually, which is the power of our new life after the pandemic. It's just so easy to collaborate virtually as we're doing right now, looking at each other on the screen. So I originally thought of this idea, had a slightly different title, pitched it I think to Grant first in a day where we were walking around Paris because I was there for the opening of our exhibition in Paris. And we talked about it. And he was my test to think, does this have legs? Can this work? And I said right off the bat, Tom is the other one I'd want to talk to it about. And then so once Grant liked the idea, that gave me confidence to approach Tom. And he liked the idea. And neither one of them said the words I was most afraid of. Great idea, but we're way too busy. We're all way too busy. We're doing this off the side of our very busy desks, but none of us said that we're too busy. And we found a way to make this work and get this done. Then we debated the title, we debated the focus, we debated who the audience was, you know, what kind of content we want to get out there. We do want to focus on things that we do think meet our own test of the truth. It's not called the Urban Opinion Collective. So you know, to a certain extent, we've got to be able to have some confidence in our ability to defend the things we say based on our expertise, our experience, etc. And yeah, we've debated almost every element of the messaging we've been getting out there. And now we've been debating our first big campaign that we're about to launch very soon, which is going to be really cool to see how it lands.

Speaker 1:
[22:02] What are your thoughts, Tom?

Speaker 2:
[22:04] Yeah, it's been very interesting. I mean, again, I've known Brent and Grant on the periphery for a while and seeing what they're doing. And for me, it was a really interesting opportunity because kind of the wealth of knowledge that they have. So getting information from them and helping kind of my role, in a sense, is kind of taking some of this really great information that they have and trying to help shape and frame it in a way that, for me, one of the audience is being kind of a mainstream general broader audience who may not have interest in city planning or streets or transportation and framing things up to them that they can connect to and relate to, which is, I think, is a bit of a gap that's out there. And sometimes, yeah, a bit of a broken bridge where things get lost in translation with sometimes a bit too data heavy and maybe sometimes too research specific for a regular kind of mainstream audience. So, yeah, my kind of role is to take some of this really, really good information and hopefully cultivate messages that can connect to people in a way, yeah, that they can relate to in their lives. Again, similar to how we do with consumer products for forever, essentially, and kind of apply that into this transportation city building space.

Speaker 1:
[23:14] 15-minute neighborhoods, low-traffic neighborhoods. In the past, it was agenda 21. What makes these easy targets for disinformation?

Speaker 4:
[23:23] I think they're easy targets in the way anything's an easy target for disinformation when you have enough money to spend on it. We don't really want to be doing a lot of debunking or following the money, but we do need to do a little bit of it. And the little bit I've done has taken me down some crazy rabbit holes. You have the tea party, you have the John Burke Society, the Koch brothers, you have really big spenders putting money into these kinds of conspiracy theory arguments. So I really don't think that they're such easy pickings because they almost have to invent lizard people living in these 15-minute cities to make them sound bad. None of the critiques about 15 cities that I know of have really been grounded in reality. Open-air jails, again, this is missed. If you can throw enough money at this kind of nonsense, you can throw it at anything. So I think it's much more about the money and who is spending the money on these disinformation campaigns than it is the 15-minute cities themselves.

Speaker 3:
[24:25] But can I add, just aside from the money, there's the strategy which these folks, actually, these evil sinister folks out there seem to understand. Make a simple message that really resonates. Lean in on fear because fear works. Repetition, repetition, repetition. They're branding their ideas. When they're saying space lasers, that's a brand in a way. Whereas think about what we do as city builders. We're mind-numbingly boring and bad at this most of the time. I've actually had planners, city planners, urbanists tell me that branding your ideas is crass. It's lazy. It's beneath us. And instead, we have to use incredibly boring jargon and three-letter acronyms and terminology that no one understands. But at least we're pure about it. It's actually somewhat infuriating. And I can say that because I'm in the profession. So I'm criticizing my own profession. I'm criticizing engineers and other professions that relate to city building overall. So you gotta give them credit, the forces of evil. They're doing simple messages. They're beating us by throwing every simple message they can at the wall and seeing what sticks as as Grant often points out. And then we're scrambling around trying to debunk. Whereas Grant's research tells us that debunking doesn't work. You have to reframe. So these are all good examples of why we created what we create. Because frankly, we need help. The urbanist community, the urbanist program project needs help with the communication side, because we're not good at it and we're getting beat. We're getting beat. I see it in practice every day. Some have said that, well, the attacks on the 15-minute city have kind of died down, haven't they? That's kind of gone away. And I've said, no, it's still happening every week in city halls that I've seen. And if it has died down, it's because it's largely succeeded. I know a lot of city halls that actually have stopped using that language, because the politicians say, I don't want the tinfoil hats outside our city hall. So I don't want you using that phrase. I also, by the way, let's also avoid the phrases that existed before it, like complete communities and walkable neighborhoods, because someone might say that's 15-minute city or Agenda 21 or something like that, right? So it's actually been working far more than we're willing to give credit. And so not only do we have to do a good job of taking new ground in terms of the conversation about better cities, we need to actually take back some of the ground we've lost by taking back these words, taking back these ideas and getting them back into City Hall when they've actually been pushed out of City Hall.

Speaker 1:
[27:15] You mentioned repetition. How important is that?

Speaker 2:
[27:18] Yeah, very. I mean, we're up against obviously an auto-centric dominated space and oversaturated space for almost 100 years. So we can put our message out once, but the idea of reinforcing that message is really, really important considering the uphill battle that we obviously have. I think talking about walkable neighborhoods, and I think it's so important to, when you look at the benefits of a walkable neighborhood for your average person, it's so clearly beneficial to regular folks to move through their city easily. All the things that we've been told that are bad for us, this kind of conspiracy side, is completely ridiculous. As a regular kind of parent, to speak for myself here, there's nothing better than kicking my kids out of the house at 8 a.m. And they can go walk to school by themselves. I get more time for myself. I can sit at home, send them to the store to get me something. I can sit back, listen to a record, read a book. These are all selfish things. And I think we should start playing in that space and sell some of these benefits, targeting people's selfish interests, right? What's in it for me? Why? I don't care about a bike lane, but I might care that my kid can get to school by themselves, and I can have some time to myself. And as a busy parent, getting through life is chaos. So the more time that my kid can do things on their own independently, which of course is good for them. But selfishly, I get time to listen to music and play some guitar at home.

Speaker 1:
[28:46] Alleviation of time poverty.

Speaker 3:
[28:47] Yeah. Can I jump in on the repetition point?

Speaker 1:
[28:50] Of course.

Speaker 3:
[28:50] I want to make this point. I have had arguments with urbanists about social media, about the fact that I re-post the same post more than once. The mindset of some urbanists, and it's always urbanists who say this, professionals who say you post the same post once a month. Yes, I do. Imagine the car company only running their car commercial once a month. They run it three times per commercial break during football games, right? Because they understand that repetition works. And what's the quote that you use in the reframing that the best determiner of an idea resonating is how many times they've heard it? Is that right?

Speaker 4:
[29:31] Yeah, Frameworks Institute, exactly.

Speaker 3:
[29:33] So I've been criticized by urbanists for reposting my posts once a month. And I sort of say a polite version of you're crazy. If you think you can post something once and claim mission accomplished, the enemy forces know that's not true and they're repeating over and over again.

Speaker 1:
[29:51] Yeah, it's frustrating. I mean, the competition you're up against. I mean, I'm just thinking about, you know, in global politics, too. I mean, thinking about like the bot networks and like the amazing amount of just like flooding the zone that happens because of, you know, the way that people actually do understand that actually works over and over again. And so that's that's super frustrating.

Speaker 3:
[30:11] We really need to change our approach, our attitudes, our biases, our norms, our sense of politeness, because we're way too polite. And we have to rethink all of our tactics if we're actually going to win, because right now we're losing.

Speaker 1:
[30:28] This is a long question, so bear with me for a second. Earlier this year, I was listening to David Roberts, who has a podcast called Volts. And I don't know if you're familiar with David's work. I brought this up also chatting with Danny Pearlstein of Transportation Alternatives when we were talking about congestion pricing earlier this year as well. But David had Samuel Bagg on the show when they discussed something very interesting about misinformation, which is the idea that we need more fact checking or white papers to convince people of an idea, which what they're saying is that you don't need that. In fact, we need actually more social proof. And the idea that people actually are identifying with their team more than say the fact checking and those types of things, because a flat earther isn't going to necessarily change their mind. You can go to somebody and say, hey, I have all this stuff about 15 Minute Cities or Carlos Moreno said this or this data tells me this, but they're not going to believe them because the people on their team are telling them that that's not true. And so one of the ways we can do this is by organizing and thinking about it that way. We have folks like Brent on social media repeating things over and over again. We have YouTubers like City Nerd who are telling people things, podcasters like Sarah and Doug. They're doing all these things and some folks don't like the idea of war on cars or whatever, but they're actually bringing people along. They're the social proof. They're creating social identities for people who are listening to their shows. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on changing people's minds or at least providing this social proof or the social identity for people who might be on our side, but need a little bit more cajoling maybe to create this movement where we can move the needle and then win these kind of endless battles.

Speaker 4:
[31:58] I think that you make a great point that we need this kind of organizing, we need this social proof. And I think that more than for getting people to get through the disinformation, we need that in order to really achieve change. The way I've seen the research on whether or not people believe disinformation or real facts or fake facts really sadly comes down to just how many times they've heard a message. You talk about space lasers enough times, people are going to think there's, you know, maybe there's two sides to this issue, maybe we really should look at these space lasers. So that comes down to money. For the most part, that comes down to money and we need to really look at the laws that are subsidizing this kind of marketing. You know, you get tax breaks for all of the marketing activities. Those are operating expenses. Why are we giving propagandist tax breaks? That's nuts. That absolutely has to change. We cannot continue to underwrite the cost of the propaganda that is manipulating us. But two, back to your main point on the need to organize and social proof, if people are ever going to come together and actually change these kinds of policies, they need to be organized. They need people, as you said, like Sarah Dug and all the podcasters you mentioned too, you need people that are sources of information, you need The Urban Truth Collective in there, you need all these different kinds of organizations. We need you, Jeff, doing the work you're doing. That's the only way we're ever going to really see change, is if we all come together and we're really focused and we demand all the policy change we need to see.

Speaker 2:
[33:30] Yeah, I guess for me, the more people we can bring onside, one way we can do this, which you mentioned with some of the podcasters, engaging people in a way that they understand and can relate to. I think that's what's really, really important with some of these messages that are obviously, they have a lot of complex in the background, but if we can connect with people in a way that they understand and relates to their lives, I think that's a real good opportunity to convert people to be allies of this overall mission and goal.

Speaker 3:
[33:59] I think what I've found in my practice where I'm often in front of 100 to 500 people in a community when we're making a plan or something like that, is that the funny thing, I say we're evidence-based, but that's in the context of deciding the ideas we're going to champion. They have to be evidence-based ideas or experience-based ideas which I consider a form of evidence. But we don't lead with the evidence because the evidence is too often boring, or we have to figure out ways to make the evidence more sexy. What I say is that my distinct approach to communication which is different than every city planner I've ever met is I lean in on great data and great storytelling. I take the data back from the engineers who say that we need that angle of daylight relative to an intersection and can't have trees in it and can't have anything or else people will die. I say, well, where's your data? And I now can cite data better than most traffic engineers in the world because I figured out the data that's most persuasive. People say that data is boring. I say, no, we are just making it boring. Our task is to make data, use data in a sexy way. I do it every day and it works. But evidence and facts don't hit the emotional side. And the other side is the storytelling side where you can relate it to their lives. That's where Tom is a genius at. And I use stories and anecdotes all the time because, and I find that those are what people remember. They remember the stories better than they remember the data. And if you can put the data in a story, they remember both. That's what I've been doing in my practice for at least 10 or 15 years. So translate that to our work now. I'm not convinced, and Grant has the evidence to back this up, but my own instinct is it's not about fact checking even. Well, we are going to fact check, but we recognize the limitations of fact checking. We are going to share evidence, but we recognize the limitations of evidence. The key is that everything we say has to be interesting, or else why would people pay attention to it? I use the word sexy and that's a crass word, but frankly, that's what the other side understands. They know how to make a scary idea sexy. I didn't think space lasers and lizard people were sexy, but evidently with some audiences, they are. So we've got to be at least as good as them at making these ideas interesting. And that's why I love people like the podcasters, like you, Jeff, like Tom and his work. Because as a practitioner, I was looking at my practice and thinking why are we so mind-numbingly boring? And then I was finding these people out there, the writers, the podcasters, the ad people, who every once in a while, they're getting stuff wrong, but I generally am still applauding them because they are showing us how to communicate better. And our profession has responded by saying, oh yeah, well I think I'll use a little less jargon and I'll make my slides 50% less wordy and that is not good enough. We are still mind-numbingly boring. So we need to learn a lot more. The practice needs to learn a lot more from the good communicators out there.

Speaker 1:
[37:19] You've talked to a lot of folks. You all have gone and made the rounds a little bit to try to get folks involved in this and make sure that folks understand what you're doing. I'm wondering what folks that are interested in this maybe haven't asked you about the process or what you're doing.

Speaker 3:
[37:33] That's a tough question, Jeff. Can you elaborate a bit?

Speaker 1:
[37:37] Well, one of the things that I like to know is when people go on speaking tours or when they talk to folks about their book or when they're interested in sharing information, they often share what people ask them because people went through their information or went through their book or anything along those lines. But often when you're doing this, when you're in the trenches, when you're working on it, you see things that other people might not see. And so I'm always interested to see or to hear what folks find interesting themselves or what folks find themselves that hasn't come up in the questions that people ask them.

Speaker 4:
[38:09] I got one. And Brent, I don't know how much you're gonna love this, so I'm gonna throw this to you. But a fun question to ask us could be, what are you guys currently disagreeing on?

Speaker 3:
[38:19] Yeah. Well, you know, there'll be subjects we don't end up talking about as a collective, because maybe two or three of us are disagreeing on it. And we made a decision early on that sort of, you know, as potentially paralyzing as this sounds, we all have a veto. At least the three of us are the coordinators. We're the ones who are overseeing the content and you can blame us if you don't like our content. The collaborators that are part of the Growing Collective, they don't get the blame on such on the stuff we're putting out. We get the blame. And so if we put something out, it's because all of us either agree with it or can live with it. But yeah, we maybe we'll do a special podcast specifically on the stuff we disagreed on. As an example, you know, I often get into debates with Grant because I'll use something and he'll say, you know, research suggests that that doesn't work. And I say, well, yeah, but a lot of the stuff I do, research would suggest doesn't work. But I find if I do it in a different and better way, it does work. So is that a message that you shouldn't do it at all? Or is it a message that we're doing it really badly? And if we can't find a better way to do it, we should stop doing it. But if we can find a better way to do it, like some of these things that he says doesn't work according to the research, and I'm not disagreeing with him, I've been doing to great success because I'm doing it in a different way. And so we can get into that back and forth. And I think that's valuable and that's constructive, right? Because we're testing each other's blind spots and we're probing for weaknesses and searching for strengths in our message and our techniques and our approaches.

Speaker 1:
[40:03] Tom, is there something you disagree with?

Speaker 2:
[40:06] I don't really have much to add to this right now. Sorry about that. Maybe in the future I will.

Speaker 3:
[40:11] I'll say this about Tom. What Tom brings to the equation, and he's self-deprecating, but Tom is a genius at... I often say I'm a good communicator for a city planner, which is a nice proviso asterisk, right? Because that doesn't mean you're a good communicator. It just means you're a good communicator compared to a pretty low bar, frankly, of my profession. So I'll send something that I think is really clever. I've used it in my posts. It gets reposted. I've used it on the radio. People say that's cool. But Tom will look at it and he'll, first of all, he'll make it shorter. Second of all, he'll make it simpler. And he'll put it down to ground level for the people that are just listening, trying to relate it to their ordinary lives, which is what he does so well. So I give Tom a lot of credit for that. That's a skill set that again, more professionals need to learn.

Speaker 1:
[41:05] All right, I got two really quick questions for you. First off, what does success look like? And the second final one is like, what can folks do to get involved?

Speaker 4:
[41:12] I think success for me is seeing the way practitioners, policymakers and the general public change the way they talk about the kinds of urban issues we want to address. And I mean, eventually the seeing the actual policy change that we want to see. I think an example, not our example, but I think it was transportation alternatives that really led the way for this was the crash, not accident campaign. That's enormously successful in the global injury prevention community in changing the way people talk about crashes. That's fantastic. We don't really have the numbers of data on it, but I would hope that would have led to more policy change. Perhaps it did. After that, we finally saw the NTU CD get revised to the United States. That's the kind of success I'd like to see from the stuff that we're doing. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:03] For me, seeing people potentially have a moment of clarity to unpack some of the absurdity that we've normalized on our streets and for people to have that moment that they can see the reality of what's been completely normalized.

Speaker 3:
[42:19] The most common question I get when I start to work with a new city as an advisor to that city, if I'm presenting to 500 people in an audience, at the Q&A, they ask, where do we start? What's the first thing? If we want to head in this direction, what would you recommend to be the first thing? I often say we can't afford to do it that linearly, so there isn't one thing. But the best answer to the one thing is you need to change the conversation. Because the prevailing conversation out there about change in cities is a barrier to better ideas. And that's just not disinformation and lies. That's just biases and preconceptions about change and all of these kinds of things. And so invariably I find that the cities that are having the better conversation are having the better outcomes. So part of my job with cities is often to create that different and better conversation. But I realize at a certain point that if I keep doing that one city at a time, you know, the conversation has to change ahead of my arrival or else it's just going to take too long and we're all doomed because we're running out of time. There's urgency to the crises that we face, climate, housing, equity, public health, infrastructure costs, etc. There is real crisis urgency here. So we need to change the conversation at a much bigger scale. And that's what I think all of us do with our podcasts and social media accounts. That's what I certainly do it for. I need to change the conversation. And I would say that the definition of success for me of this initiative, this organization, it has to make a serious dent in changing the conversation or else why did we bother?

Speaker 1:
[43:52] So how can folks get involved? How can we get everybody on board?

Speaker 3:
[43:56] So I'll handle that. It's the where the bathrooms kind of moment in the meeting. So check out our website. That's the best way to get to know us. You'll actually see our ad posters that we've been putting out. I think we're up to 16 or 17 of them. We've been putting out content in the form of individual ad posters and you'll see about us who our collaborators are. That's www.urbantruthcollective.com. It's not that big a site. You can explore it. Follow us on social media. We're most active on Bluesky. We're also on Instagram and LinkedIn and you can follow us there. We're not on the other social media platforms yet, but we're still talking about whether we should be there. We certainly like your advice on if there's other places we should be. How you get involved is we're certainly growing in terms of formal collaborators. You can see on our website who our current formal collaborators are. But you can get involved really easy. Send us your ideas, DM us or post article links to good persuasive information, good research papers, good branding articles, etc. If there's a cool idea for a poster like the ones we've done, send it our way and we'll give you credit for it. Really, there's the collective, but then there's the whole universe that we're working with and we'd like to take ideas from everyone. We're also sharing other people's ideas. It doesn't have to be our brand. It doesn't have to be our idea. You're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. That age old poster that we all love, that's a good brand. We'll put that out there and we say, boy, we wish we had thought of this one. So we're going to put out as much of this kind of branding content as we can. And if you share it with us, we'll give you credit.

Speaker 1:
[45:37] Awesome. Well, Brent, Tom and Grant, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[45:41] My pleasure. Thanks.

Speaker 1:
[45:49] And thanks for joining us, the Talking Headways Podcast is a project of The Overhead Wire and published first at Streetsblog USA. Thanks to our wonderful Patreon supporters for sponsoring this week's show and Mondays at The Overhead Wire. Find us at patreon.com/theoverheadwire. And you can sign up for our 16 year old newsletter at theoverheadwire.com. And you can also listen to our show on your podcatcher of choice, including Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, iHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. And if you can't find it there, you can always find its original home at usa.streetsblog.org. We'll see you next time at Talking Headways.