99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Original podcast
Roman and Kurt describe Oakland as it is.
8,149 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Five years ago, we came out with a book, and thanks to all you beautiful nerds, it immediately landed on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was filled with dozens of design stories from cities around the world. Some were brand new stories, some were based on episodes of the show, and others grew out of 99PI articles by the book's co-author, Kurt Kohlstedt.
And the idea was to create a kind of field guide to the city. Not any particular city, but a guide to the underlying design principles of every city.
The book was called The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. And I remember that subtitle took us like a whole lot of time to come up with.
Oh, yeah. Many phone calls were made. Much, much was made of that.
It was like hidden versus secret, every day versus like
Ordinary.
Exactly. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. And to launch the book, Kurt and I produced a special 99PI episode made of short guidebook style entries recorded in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.
And now to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the book, we're going to share those stories again today. And with that, I'm going to hand the mic back to the Roman Mars of five years ago, from October of 2020.
For the first time in a long time, I'm in our office in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. A couple of people actually still work here. Two people can occupy the space without violating any social distancing guidelines. There's two entrances. There's two different bathrooms. There's two different kitchens. I usually work at home, but today I'm here because our first book, The 99% Invisible City, has just been released into the world. Since it's a guide to the city with stories and histories of the seemingly mundane things around you, my co-author Kurt Kohlstedt and I are going to use it to explore all the everyday objects right outside our own headquarters.
But before we even leave the office, just looking at the window, there's a brick building next door. And the tops of its walls are dotted with a bunch of square metal plates. These anchor plates are a few inches across. They're pretty thin and they're spun in a bunch of different orientations. So even though they're painted to blend in with the brick, once you notice them, they kind of stand out.
You could think of them like giant washers with bolts or rods tying them into the bricks and helping brace them against the facade. And these ones happen to be square, but I've seen others in the neighborhood that are round or octagonal. In fact, anchor plates like this are pretty common in the Bay Area in part for seismic reasons. They help make sure that loose bricks don't fall off buildings and hurt people during earthquakes. These particular ones are way up high where the walls overrun the roof. So there's a parapet up there where the bricks can't be braced against the main building. And so someone installed these and connected them to metal braces on the rooftop that you can't actually see from below.
In other places, though, you can see anchor plates all the way down a facade. And in those cases, they have a ton of work to do. They help hold up entire masonry walls that might otherwise be at risk of total collapse. In the book, we have an illustration with a bunch of different shapes that you can look out for in whatever city you're in. There are squares and circles and stars and other geometric forms, but there are also some really ornate ones, like this huge curving S shape that holds up an old stone wall in Europe. But whether they look good or not so good, they've got a job to do and they all look better than the alternative, which would be, of course, a pile of stones or bricks.
So if you walk outside of our building and look back, you will see a beautiful, black, ornate fire escape. I love that we have a fire escape on our building. I know a couple of people on the staff, they climb out on it and they watch the city at night. I never do that because I'm a big chicken. Fire has long been one of the greatest existential threats. To a building and its occupants, but fire escapes became widespread kind of late in the game. Back in the 1700s, fire escapes weren't built-in features, but rather mobile ladders on carts hauled to blazes by firemen. Other solutions for escaping a fire in a multi-story building in the 1800s included parachute hats. I think you can imagine both how those looked and how they did not work at all.
There was even this widely circulated plan that proposed that if there was a fire, that archers from the ground would shoot arrows with ropes attached to them for residents on the upper floors to shimmy down. But eventually, we settled on iron fire escapes attached permanently to a building's facade. Fire escapes are thankfully not used very often, but unfortunately, this also means that they can fall into disrepair, especially if a landlord is prone to cutting corners. The infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that killed 146 people in 1911 was a national tragedy that spurred a lot of change in terms of workers' rights, but it also made people look closely at how we need safe and plentiful means of egress from buildings in case of emergency.
In this instance, one of the things that caused a lot of the deaths was that the fire escape collapsed under the weight of all the people trying to flee for their lives. Since then, and especially today, managing the flow of people during an emergency is a top consideration. It's still not perfect, obviously. If you look around the city, most buildings don't seem to have fire escapes anymore. The newer buildings never do. But looks can be deceiving. These buildings, they do have fire escapes, but they've essentially been swallowed up by buildings, evolving into fortified stairs. Fire stairs often double as ordinary staircases used on a daily basis, but they have extra protections and features to make them safer routes of escape during emergencies.
So you could be walking on the great granddaughter of this fire escape every day and not even notice it.
So right next door to our office, there's a storefront. And the businesses inside and there have changed over the years. But out front, there's this persistent element and it's a planter. And the planter is kind of recessed into the facade a bit. So the edge of it, the front edge of it is up against the sidewalk. And the plants and dirt are held in place by this low retaining wall. That's maybe a couple inches deep. And, you know, under the best of circumstances, it wouldn't be a great place to sit. Although I've seen people try. But what makes it really, really unappealing is this row of knobs that they have arrayed along the top of the wall.
And we've talked about things like spikes on the show before that dissuade people from sitting. But these knobs, they look almost decorative. Like they're painted black to blend in with the black wall. They're defensive design, but like in disguise. And when we think about things like defensive design or hostile architecture, we tend to imagine obvious things like spikes. But there are a lot of less obvious ones, too. Some places have sprinkler systems that are situated to keep people away rather than to, you know, actually water plants. And in Seattle, there's this one bike rack in particular that's kind of infamous because
people started to question, you know, why did somebody put a bike rack there? That's not a place people would normally park their bikes. And it turned out that this was put there by the city to keep people from setting up tents and camping on that particular stretch of sidewalk. And, you know, big picture, a lot of these interventions, they don't tackle bigger underlying issues. They just kind of shuffle people around. And to me, that's a good argument for transparency, among other things. Because when you disguise something, you stop conversations from starting around it. Right? So once it's clear why something is the way it is,
people can start to debate whether or not a given design quote unquote solution is humane or equitable or even effective.
Looking down on our street corner, you'll see a bunch of spray painted marks on the road and on the sidewalk. So here's a fun fact. The first two-page illustration in the book, located just before chapter one, is an illustration of this very spot. Kurt took the picture from our window. The colorful spray painted markings are a guide to all the pipes and wires and tubes crisscrossing below this surface, and they are there for a very important reason. "In June of 1976, workers were excavating a stretch of Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, and accidentally cut into a hidden petroleum pipeline. The pipe ruptured and pressurized gas ignited into a fireball that engulfed passing cars and adjacent businesses.
More than two dozen people were injured or killed. This wasn't the first or last tragedy of its kind, but the enormity of this particular disaster helped catalyze the codification of these color-coded utility markings. So in general, anyone excavating on public property is required to contact a regional alert organization before digging into the ground, so that the different utility agencies can come out and mark the hazards that may be below. The American National Standards Institute has formalized which colors indicate which utility." So this is my favorite part. So red is for electrical power lines. Orange is for telecommunications. Yellow is for gaseous or combustive materials, like natural gas or petroleum. Green is for sewage lines. There are a few other colors,
but those are some of the biggies. For some reason, an infinity symbol is used to indicate the beginning or end of a proposed project area, even though an infinity symbol is normally applied to things without a beginning or an end. So obviously, some colors and symbols are more intuitive than others. But what I love about all this official graffiti is that for this stretch of concrete, we all have x-ray vision, if we know how to decode it.
So on our block, there's a relatively recent renovation that added a bunch of traffic calming devices, things like planters and ballards to hem in the cars a bit and slow people down and to make it easier to cross the street. And it's pretty good.
But further up the street, if you if you go up a bit, there's a much more traditional and classical and recognizable traffic calming feature, a speed bump. And it's pretty typical. It it looks like any other speed bump. It's just a raised stretch of pavement that goes across the lane and it's meant to slow people down. And in the book, we write about, you know, a bunch of different traffic calming strategies. But there's this one in particular that I really am into. And what it's called sort of depends on who you ask. But if you Google speed cushion, you'll get the right result. And what makes it special is actually
pretty simple. It's got these wheel wide slices cut through it. So if you see one, it actually looks more like three smaller speed bumps side by side. But why? Well, there's space to accommodate emergency vehicles like ambulances. So for a normal driver of a normal car with normal wheel spacing, it still works like a speed bump. But for a driver rushing to save lives, they can breeze right through without slowing down. And honestly, it's pretty simple, but I think it's quite ingenious.
Okay, traffic lights. We already told you about the one in Syracuse, New York, with the green on top of the red as a symbol of Irish pride. But that isn't the only funky thing going on with traffic light colors in the world. In Japan, their green light is more of a bluish green. And this comes from the fact that their interpretation of the color blue Or ow, that's A-O, ow, as they say. I mean, that's the best I can say, as they say. The color ow historically encompasses hues that most English speakers in the West would call green. Japan was not a signatory to the Vienna Conventions on Road Signs and Signals, which was this multilateral treaty systematizing road signs, markings, and lights across dozens of countries.
And so, for nearly 100 years, Japanese stoplights have been labeled "blue" on official documents, even though many languages would call the color they see on Japanese traffic lights "green." So in order to cut down on international confusion, they came to a compromise. In 1973, the government mandated that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible. So it's a color that is technically green, but blue enough to be called ow. So if you go to Japan, their green traffic lights may be more, you know, grue or blene, but still just keep moving along all as well.
While we're in the headspace of Japan by way of Oakland, I want to tell you about the manhole covers of Osaka. Oh my god, they're beautiful. The Oakland manhole covers in our neighborhood are so boring in comparison to those in Osaka. There's one that looks like an ornate woodblock print showing Osaka Castle wrapped in blue waves and white cherry blossoms. And fancy covers dot streets all over the country with pictures of flowers, and animals, and buildings, and bridges, and boats, and mythical heroes, and rising phoenixes. These artistic covers gained popularity in the 1980s when a government bureaucrat named Yasutaki Kameta proposed them as a way to raise awareness of the awesomeness of municipal sewer systems.
And make no mistake, municipal sewer systems are awesome. No one should need to be convinced of that. But he wanted to levy more taxes to improve and expand the sewer network, and so the fancy covers were the focus of a visibility and appreciation campaign. He even encouraged different cities to compete over who had the best lids. Now, you could easily spend a good hour marveling at Japanese manhole covers online. In fact, I encourage you to do just that. These Oakland ones, though, they kind of suck. But municipal water systems, they're still amazing.
So if there's one thing I always notice when I walk around downtown Oakland, it's this giant array of stuff on top of this tall building a few blocks from our office. And it's hard to tell from far away and from down on the ground. But these things are huge, like the size of SUVs. They're curved at the top and they taper as they go down and they face in various directions. But what are they? Well, they're microwave relay towers. And they're vestiges of this really remarkable technology from the mid 1900s.
Back in the 1950s, AT&T engaged in this huge nationwide construction project. The company deployed a whole network of these relays across the country. And sure, okay, long networks existed already, but not like this. What I find most amazing about these relays is that they were wireless and required lines of sight, which means every array had to be visible to the others around it in order to relay signals. So these are point-to-point relays and they bounced information from coast to coast across the entire United States. For decades, they connected cities to cities across these vast expanses.
You could see them up on mountain tops, uh, just everywhere across the country. If you Google a map of them, it's really incredible how extensive they were. And now, of course, in the days of fiber optics and satellites, they're basically obsolete. And some of them are long gone, but many are still up, like these ones in Oakland. Alas, one of my favorite sets that I really liked in Minneapolis got taken down recently. It formed this kind of crown around the top of this building downtown. And so you can't go look for that particular one anymore, but you can see an illustration of it in our book. And some relays are still up because it's just too much hassle to dismantle them.
And there's really no reason to. But in other cases, like this tower in Los Angeles, they are factored into the architecture itself. So they're like made to fit into the design of the building. And in part, that makes them harder to spot. Because, you know, you don't really know what they're there for. And they could just be kind of an architectural flourish. And even in cases where they do stand out more, they're not always easy to see because the tops of buildings are covered with a lot of stuff like HVAC systems and satellite dishes. But once you know what you're looking for, you'll just start seeing them everywhere.
Most of the numbered streets downtown are one-way, which means they have white dashed centerlines that divide the lanes. This innovation is credited to one man, Edward N. Hines. He was a road booster and a member of the Wayne County Road Commission in Michigan in the early 20th century, when cars were just getting more widespread on roads. The story goes, he was driving on a country road behind a milk truck that was leaking its cargo. And this inspired him to invent lane dividing centerlines. This always struck me as a ridiculous story. But anyway, however he got the inspiration, thanks to Hines, the first stripe of paint dividing lanes was laid down in Wayne County, which includes Detroit. And from there, lines began to be drawn through curves and danger zones
to encourage cars to stick to their side in those particularly hazardous spots. And then eventually, they appeared on all roads in the county and then across the state. Today, roadways across the US feature millions of miles of paint from coast to coast. Hines certainly left an indelible mark on the world, even if that milk truck story is bullshit.
So there's a lot of construction going on right now in Oakland. A lot of sidewalks are torn up or closed down in downtown area. A lot of beautiful murals though around. But if you, uh, if you're walking down the sidewalk, a few blocks from our office, you can see these little plaques embedded underfoot. And this one is pretty clearly worded.
It says, "Private property, permission to pass over, revocable at any time." Some of them a bit more cryptic. They say things like "space within building lines not dedicated", which can be kind of hard to parse. But the message is the same. It's basically, "Hey, you can walk here, but just so you know, this is technically private property." And sometimes owners will, you know, build right up to the property line, or, you know, put landscaping out that marks off the edge of their territory. But when they don't, this is a way for them to maintain their ownership. And so some install these shiny metal plaques and others just stamp messages like these right into the concrete.
And effectively, they're telling you, "Hey, you're on private property in a place that you might not think is private property." So it might feel like a public sidewalk, but it's not. And if you look down a sidewalk, you can often see a bigger pattern, like a series of these forming a long dashed line. And that, of course, marks out the property's edge. And then at the corner, you might find a right angled version. And that's of course to mark out the corner of the property. So together, these form an outline of the building property footprint. And they're important for building owners because of something called adverse possession. Now, the laws around this vary from place to place.
But the basic idea is that if you don't explicitly reserve your property rights somehow, you could lose them. So the easement markers are there in case the owners want to build out later.
But in the meantime, they're also conceding some space for semi-public use, which is nice. And once you recognize what these markers signify and start to see them, you'll also start to see open spaces differently. And recognize that there are invisible lines dividing public and private property, or at least invisible until, you know, you start reading the flags.
Those are just a handful of stories from the 99% Invisible City, inspired by the things on our street. When you get the book, you can explore about 400 pages of similar stories. And if you listen to me reading the audiobook, it's about 11 hours. You can put it on at bedtime. You can listen all the way through the night without having to queue up another episode or listen to a furniture ad, although I like the furniture ads. It is an interesting time to be alive and an interesting time to be putting out this book. Since we're not really traveling and generally sticking close to home, this is accidentally a perfect field guide for this moment. It's a guide to the wonder of the built world right in your own neighborhood, using examples from all over the globe.
Maybe it will be a comfort to you. It was designed to be a good companion and to bring more joy in the world. We're trying to get it out to as many people as possible and expand our little tribe of plaque readers, design fanatics, and curious urbanists. You can get a copy for yourself and your friends and your family at 99pi.org/book. Coming up, Kurt and I talk about some of the behind the scenes of making the book and answer many questions people have been asking about the process. Stay with us.
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So I'm talking with Kurt Kohlstedt. He's the Digital Director of 99% Invisible and the co-author of the book. And we want to answer a lot of the questions that we've been asked as we've been putting together the book over the last couple of years.
Yeah, and some of these are questions that have come up, you know, over and over again. And so I've sort of distilled them down and said, okay, like, which ones are the ones that people are asking the most? And we came up with these questions that seem to sort of synthesize the things that people are interested in knowing more about.
Right. So the first one is about the process of gathering material and picking topics and organizing all of the book. I mean, one of the things that we had working for us and against us was the 10 years of the show. So there's a lot of like information, information presented in different ways, tons of stuff that's in the book that, you know, never has appeared on a show before. So let's talk a little bit about how we organize the book.
There's this joke I've been telling friends, you know, if you're gonna write a book... Maybe write it about one thing instead of a hundred things. And, you know, it's a really unique challenge to try to bring all of these stories together under one roof and to figure out, you know, not just what to include, but how to, how to structure the whole thing.
Yeah.
Going way back, it, this is the thing that we first started talking about, like my first text file that has the field guide idea sitting in it is from June 2017. We started to think about, okay, how might this work? What kinds of things might we want to include? And I started, you know, writing articles and we started doing shows with that in the back of our mind, like which things are we covering or not covering that would make sense to include in a book about cities and design?
Right.
And then in 2018, we started to really sit down with this thing and we started working on this giant spreadsheet.
Which was a list of every article that you've ever written and every episode that we've ever done.
And a bunch of ideas on top of that. And there were all of these different tabs. It was this massive thing.
It was really something to behold.
And, and then you and I went through and we rated them on a scale to one to five of what type of things would be included in the, the book that each of us is conceiving in our mind before it had actually been put together.
Right. And that was sort of this initial weeding out process where it's like, okay, if you say it's a one and I say it's a five, maybe we should talk about it. But of course there are a lot of places where we just agreed. It's like, well, this has to be in the book.
This is a story we need to tell. And, and one of the ways that I've explained it to other people too, is like, you know, you had this idea, and maybe I'm oversimplifying a little, but you had this idea of including the best possible stories, uh, which is a great idea. I had this idea of, you know, making sure it all made sense as a book, you know, making sure there were sort of arcs within stories, but also between stories and, and sections and chapters. And, and I think that tension was actually a really productive tension. You were sort of checking me on, are you just trying to fit this in because you kind of want it to make more sense as a, as a bigger thing?
Right, right.
Or is it actually a good story?
Yeah. One of the other tensions was this idea of like, how much to be a field guide that related to what was happening in most cities and how much to tell, you know, the best and most interesting story possible. And I think we, I think we walked the line really well, but it was definitely something we thought about each step of the way. Like I have a particular affinity for kind of the most interesting story about the most everyday or mundane thing. Like that's my favorite version of this. That's kind of the heart of the field guide as a concept. But there's so many things that don't quite fit into that, that we just were just excited about, you know, like especially new things. Like when you would come back with some research about stuff that, you know, we never covered in the show, those were my favorite because I often get, you
know, like if I've covered it, I'm like, I'm like, oh, I know, I know it already. And so like, when it came back with like Battenberg and, and various other things, like that was really the type of thing that I was like, really, really jazzed about when it came to putting the book together.
And for me too, like as a person who is, you know, a fan of the show for years before I joined the show, there was some fun in revisiting old, old stories and, and sort of looking at the raw material and looking what had happened since those stories were published and sort of rethinking it all for the book. And, and, you know, like the Chicago River comes to mind. And, you know, we talked about the Chicago River, or you did in a, in an old episode.
Yeah, that was one we did a years ago with Dan Weisman.
But, you know, in the book, we talk about it in a different way. You know, I found some more history to that. That was kind of fun and interesting. And so what we ended up with in the book was this kind of combination of some things drawn from the episode, some, some sort of new developments in the case and then some more history too. So it's
Totally.
It was fun for me to dive back into some of the classics and like expand on, on that material as well.
Yeah. And it really is a different thing to create a book versus to create a story for a podcast. You know, a lot of people asked us about like how it differs, like with audio storytelling in terms of structure and approach. When you're writing for audio, you know that it's linear. You know that people are only hearing it, you know, in order once and they're not sort of scanning it the same way that they do when it comes to written text. And so there's this process of reiterating the point, you know, anecdote and reflection, anecdote and reflection, and reiterating a point. And it is something that it does not work in text. And it was something that was really clear when we started
working with Kate, our editor at HMH. She really helped guide and put us in a direction towards a more written format. It was just learning a new skill, especially for me, for sure.
Oh, for me too. And just the leveling up that happened as we got more involved with them and involved them more in the process. So for us, we started out writing essays and it started to graduate towards sections. But, you know, soon enough, we were sending these essays and sections to the editor and getting back feedback at the kind of granular level. And then it took a long time to kind of build that up into these larger chapters. And each stage of the review, it was like we would send something bigger and wait a little longer, but get more feedback. And but fortunately, early on in the process, we did get a lot of guidance from them about what does and doesn't work in a book, which helped us decide.
You know, how are we going to tie different stories together? It turned out I had this idea early on that, that, you know, each story would really clearly dovetail with the next.
Yeah, and they did not want that. Kate was just like, no, people will not read it that way. I remember each one, we, you and I like labored over these handoff final sentences that would lead right to the next essay. And Kate, Kate Napolitano, who was like a fantastic editor, who did amazing work with us, you know, was kind of, was kind of just like, you don't need to do this. Like, if they're going to read the next one, they're going to read the next one. If they're not, and if you really mean it, that, that people can skip around and read different parts, then it just doesn't help. And it was like, oh yeah, I guess you're right. But I, I remember, like, we had all, I, I'm trying to think of like, if there was one type of sentence most consistently cut, it was probably one of these like pithy handoff sentences
that leads directly to the, the first paragraph of the next essay.
Right. And we ended up with a kind of compromise where it, it's, it's like, if you do keep reading, you will connect the dots.
We're not going to connect those dots for you, but if you're reading straight through, you'll see, it's like a little Easter egg, you know? Like, you're reading straight through, you'll catch on to the connections between these different pieces. But you're not kind of forced to read straight through in order to make those connections either, and you can jump around.
Exactly, exactly. And it was all, that whole process, everything about the process, A, was, I think, you know, pretty smooth. Like, it was like a really good, they were good collaborators in a sense. But one of the things that was just really different was the timeline of a book. I mean, like, you know, we do a show every week. It takes maybe six to eight weeks to make an episode of the show. So there's always this constant churn. You put out articles, you know, like, there was a little bit less of them when, when you were working on the book.
Yeah, I had to set some of that aside a little bit.
Of course, which you needed to. But, you know, we're very used to a production process that has a different metabolism than that of the, of a book creation. Having a long deadline that's really far in the future, like what is what happens with a book, is terrible. And what makes it almost excruciating is having a weekly deadline that runs.
In parallel to that deadline.
Well, and the only way the long deadline of the book worked really was to break it down into these shorter deadlines and to say, okay, well, we're gonna have chapter, a version of chapter one by X and a version of chapter two by Y. It's like, where do you start? How do you find the kind of motivation to do this if you don't? And yet, one of the surprises to me, I mean, I look back and I think it's so silly, but I, I told, you know, friends and family towards the end of 2019, I'm like, well, we're almost through the hard part. And, you know, it seems so naive in hindsight. It's just, it's a process and it keeps going. And as soon as you're done with one thing, you've got to kind of move on to the next, whether it's working with the illustrator and working with the designer, there's, there's
always something to be done. And the text is part of that and the text is a key part of that.
But it isn't all of it for sure.
No, not by a long shot.
It was just deciding on illustrations and in design and in color and the printing and the, you know, just everything about it was just so complicated. And one of those things that we were really involved in, because one of the pitfalls of having a show about design is that the book you make better be good. You don't want it to be bad. It better look good, it better read well, it better flow, it better have a reason for existing. That was my main thing is like, is like, I already get the opportunity to tell millions of people stories about design. So why should a book exist? And what can it do that the show can't do?
And that's something that we were constantly thinking about of how to exploit those differences between a book and a podcast and a website. And so all those things required so much thought. I mean, so much so that I think HMH was shocked at the level of detail, especially you were writing them with.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think they expected, you know, they're used to authors. Authors are authoring, right? They're writing, they're doing the tech stuff. But of course, you know, we're interested in design, so we want to work with the designer. We want to work with the illustrator. We want to, you know, make this a designed object. And I have this background in architecture. And so I'm not a great designer, but I, but I at least like the process and know how it works. And so a lot of it was sort of navigating this, this challenging thing, which you always have to navigate with designers, which is to say, figure out what their strengths are.
So we spent, for example, a lot of time looking at the portfolios of both Patrick Vale and Raphael Geroni, who are the illustrator and designer of the book, and saying, okay, how can we lean into their strengths? How can we sort of give them the freedom to do what they do well, but make sure we also cover the things that we need to cover in the course of this design process?
Yeah. So when we went through and took every story we've ever told in whatever format and put it into a big spreadsheet and ranked them from one to five about what to include in the book, we both quickly settled on the first one being the official graffiti. It had an explosion. It seemed like a good thing that people would see everywhere. There was a story behind it. We could teach people how to decode it in ways that were really fun and obvious. And so I remember that being kind of one of the first ones we settled on. This leads me to one of the last ones we included. So there was a drama in San Francisco with these boulders, which is in chapter six, which is really the last story that we included at all. And I remember you asking me like, like, is this worth it?
You know, like you, I'm pretty bedraggled and tired from the other 400 pages of writing.
It just felt like, like I also was worried. I was like, is, is the publisher going to say, guys, you have to stop adding stuff? Please. And so I was like, you know, can we, can we convince them to just sneak this one last piece in?
And it sort of encapsulated so much of what we were talking about already in chapter six, that it was just like, yeah, I think we gotta do it.
And one of the questions that we've gotten asked too is, you know, what's your favorite piece? And that's hard to nail down. I really liked the first piece in the book. I do think it sort of captures the essence of the book really well. But in some ways, some of my favorite pieces are the ones I had to fight for.
So there was some consideration of, of cutting a few pieces, one of which was the piece about standardized time.
Right, right. This was the story of how different towns had to finally start coordinating their clocks because the train was coming and they had to get on the same schedule.
And what I realized, sort of going back over it is, is that it wasn't super clear. It was probably too long. I could see how it wasn't working, but I really thought that the ideas in it were worth keeping and that it was a story worth telling, just in shorter form.
And so it became one of my favorites because it became one I had to work on in order to justify keeping it in the book, basically.
Yeah. I do, I remember us sitting at my kitchen table and us going over that one and me being one of the naysayers who just was like, this is too complicated. Like people are not, people can't do math in this, in this way. And asking you questions about like, why is this important? And having you, you know, obviously just come through with it. And I remember, you know, like, I've more recently, you know, had the deep dive with the book because I've been reading it, you know, in, in, in the studio out loud. And that's a great section. It really works. Like you did a great job making that like relevant and not complicated and make people understand what it really meant to standardized
time when this was not a concern of people at all for, you know, millennia.
Yeah. And, and I remember that conversation too. And, and it was like, I needed, I got it. Like I understood why I was so attached to it.
But I needed some way, I basically needed you to talk to and you to say, "Okay, just explain it to me. Like, don't read it, just explain it to me." And once I did, you saw the kind of passion I had for it. I think we both realized, "Okay, there's something here. It's just not fully on the page right now."
So it's like, we gotta go back to the drawing board a bit and, and figure out how to simplify this and streamline this so that it's just a compelling story.
So it has been five years since we published the book, 15 years since I started the show. And actually, 10 years ago this month, Kurt Kohlstedt started working with us. All marvelous things to celebrate, and the best way to do that is to get yourself a copy of The 99% Invisible City. Go to 99pi.org/book. It's available in hardback and audio format. If you want to listen to me read it to you for 11 hours, you can do that, too. You can even get yourself a signed copy. It's all available at 99pi.org/book.
This episode originally aired in 2020 and was produced by me and Kurt Kohlstedt. Remix by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laishma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server.
There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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