Roman Mars on Flags, Phones, and the Design of Everyday Life

Roman Mars has built one of podcasting's great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed design choices that quietly shape how cities and objects work, from speed bump psychology and flag design to the shape of a good street sign. His TED Talk on vexillology (the study of flags) is so influential that it has reportedly spurred 250 to 300 municipal flag redesigns across the country, including in Pocatello, Idaho, a city he once publicly called out for having the worst flag in America. Tyler asked questions about nearly every visual surface of modern life, and Mars's answers keep circling back to the same tension: beauty and efficiency are often at odds, and most of what looks ugly to us is just a compromise we haven't yet learned to love. Tyler and Roman discuss street signs, why classic cars were so much more distinctive than today's SUVs, Waymos, New Jersey jughandles, yellow streetlights, lane-stripe colors, why Houston keeps growing despite its lack of charm, whether any post-war American suburb is actually beautiful, the Chrysler Building's rocky reception, brutalism done right and wrong, Central Park as an urban miracle, what Jane Jacobs got wrong, e-bike lanes, Tokyo's bike-free transit model, the placelessness of global coffee shops, why the iPhone looks boring now, the ugliest country he's visited, his love for Australia's polymer notes, his soft spot for the dollar's "locked in amber" weirdness, underground power lines, how to warn future civilizations about nuclear waste, why highway signs lie to you about speed limits, the principles of a great city flag, the Pocatello redesign saga, his own studio, why 99% Invisible works precisely because it's audio-only, the most unusual habit behind his long productive career, and more. Read a transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/roman-mars/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/TZdoYBGUBYI on YouTube. Recorded August 28th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://x.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://x.com/tylercowen on X Follow Roman https://x.com/romanmars on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.com/invite/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:08 - On urban and suburban design 00:21:55 - On phone design 00:24:36 - On the world's ugliest places 00:26:03 - On currency design 00:28:33 - On power lines, speed bumps, and nuclear warning signs 00:34:31 - On city flags 00:40:39 - On building 99% Invisible 00:45:06 - Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  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 conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. 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 Kohlstedt. Roman, welcome.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:08Tyler Cowen?

  I have many design questions for you.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I hope I have design answers for you.

• 1:14Tyler Cowen?

  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? And what makes them that way?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my Lord. I don't know if I know a good answer for this. I'd be happy to hear your answer. I mean, what I find mostly as I'm getting older is that the most beautiful street signs are the ones I can see the best. And I'm always confounded by the fact that, especially as a pedestrian, like, street signs are often the vantage point that they're really concerned about is a driver versus a walker. And as a walker, you'll find that the street sign is sort of placed before the intersection, like, it's for the driver approaching, and that you'll be on a corner, and you'll be looking around New York, and like, I don't know where I am. You know what I mean? 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.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  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 forge ahead, and you'll get there eventually.

• 2:23Tyler Cowen?

  Venice has good street signs, but for size, I would go with Los Angeles.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're quite big.

• 2:28Tyler Cowen?

  They're designed for drivers.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I've only been to Spain a little bit.

• 2:41Tyler Cowen?

  Classic choices.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but they're quite beautiful. There's an abundance of good choices, but to me, it's about functionality.

• 2:47Tyler Cowen?

  I like the more artistic 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 stark, and it's in this very Swiss font. So that's my personal favorite, but I don't think it would win a poll.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, it just matters if it works for you.

• 3:08Tyler Cowen?

  Here's another question I've thought about. Why is it that older cars, maybe most classically from the early 1960s, but not only, they're so much more attractive than today? Today, so many cars or SUVs, they look literally the same, right?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:23Tyler Cowen?

  They're so boring. They're not offensive, but in the aggregate, maybe they're offensive. And what happened?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  This is 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. That'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 forums that were 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 couldn't 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 unnecessarily in cars

• 4:10Speaker 01

  during our sort of extractive phase of manufacturing, where we made big and bold choices because we didn't care that the things got 10 miles to the gallon, and the shapes of the fins 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 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, yeah, 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,

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I don't really like them necessarily when they do. I think the Cybertruck is a horrible-looking vehicle, but it looks a lot different, mainly because its utility is quite terrible. But, yeah, 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.

• 5:11Tyler Cowen?

  Do you find Waymos attractive? Because I do. They look different. They look futuristic.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Because of all the gadgetry on top?

• 5:18Tyler Cowen?

  It's almost satire how they look, but I enjoy it. I smile.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, 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 Waymos seem very great. They also seem like very clear that a robot-driving car is way better than a human driving a car, so I have no problem personally with them.

• 5:59Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think the nightmare goes away if you confront it?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Maybe. I think there's a chance of that. But it's definitely, it's my one recurring thing, is like, being in a speeding, uncontrolled car, and I have to climb over from the backseat to control it.

• 6:13Tyler Cowen?

  Now, I grew up in New Jersey, where we have what's sometimes called the panhandle.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Jug handles, yeah.

• 6:18Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  There's some good thought inefficiency 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, there's a nice thing of avoiding long left turns or 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 decisions, 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 lefts, I'd be all for it. But it's the sort of inconsistency, which is, which I think is a little bit of a problem.

• 7:13Tyler Cowen?

  But maybe no one really visits New Jersey, right? You wouldn't do it in California or Florida, where plenty of people visit.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  That's true. It is definitely made for the people who are there.

• 7:25Tyler Cowen?

  And 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 beach, it's the shore.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:37Tyler Cowen?

  And thus, it may work there. I worry that as the value of land goes up, the jug handle or panhandle, it takes up more land.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  It certainly does. What it saves 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 way around the block to make sure I'm not making a left in a place that I'm not confident making a left. So, I think the jug handle 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 its utility is somewhat diminished.

• 8:10Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think of 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?

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yellow lighting, like, as in the overhead?

• 8:20Tyler Cowen?

  Instead of white?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  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 of light pollution. Mostly, it's a good, it's a good thing, but 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 streetlights, 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.

• 8:58Tyler Cowen?

  What color should the central stripe be?

• 9:01Speaker 01

  On a road?

• 9:01Tyler Cowen?

  On a road, yeah. Just white, or?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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, like, double line if you don't want to cross. That makes, I think that'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 cat's 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.

• 9:31Tyler Cowen?

  Now, 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. Yet Houston is growing pretty rapidly, and the small towns are shrinking. How should I interpret that trend?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  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, a net negative to only sort of build a city around a car.

• 10:03Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  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, 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 populace in the United States and heterogeneity of like what they care about, that 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.

• 10:41Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 10:56Tyler Cowen?

  And the country overall, the living structures become more beautiful. Is there a path toward that, or is that just impossible now?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  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 in cities and what they're going for. Like, there's always a habit of care that is retained. Like, when you go to Chicago

• 11:46Speaker 01

  and you see all the skyscrapers, like, all the skyscrapers, there was like a bonus 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 the Trump International Hotel, it had these like different levels, and it like, one of those levels is the exact same height as the Wrigley Building. The next level is the next height of the next building around. It's 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.

• 12:29Tyler Cowen?

  But say, is there any residential neighborhood, take just the United States, post-World War II, that you would say is beautiful, in the same way you would say Shaker Heights is beautiful, or some suburbs of Chicago are beautiful? Because I can't think of one, frankly.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Okay, can I think of a beautiful suburb?

• 12:46Tyler Cowen?

  No, I would say parts of Copenhagen are quite new and beautiful, parts of Helsinki, but there's not much in the Western world. And in the US, I can't think of anything.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  I don't know if I can think of something off the top of my head like that.

• 13:02Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  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 has 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 it have 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 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 Stephen

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Dubner from Freakonomics about this at one point, and we were discussing this idea. And I was like, I was like, I don't, I don't want buildings 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, less beautiful. But there'll 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, finding 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.

• 14:33Tyler Cowen?

  Why wasn't the Chrysler Building more popular at first?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it leaned in at a time period of the upswing of modernism. And you know, it has all these, like, what are considered, at the time, be kind of garish adornments, you know, like the silver hubcaps and the eagles and things that evoke cars like the Chrysler. And so, you know, modernists that were, especially architecture critics at the time, you know, were like, oh, this is a, this is like silly filigree on this building. I think it's gorgeous. I love that building. But its 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.

• 15:21Tyler Cowen?

  Do you enjoy brutalism?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  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, 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, it 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. Like, I love the, the Barbican in London. I, I think

• 16:07Speaker 01

  there's a functionality to that place that's, that's really gorgeous, and the shapes of it are gorgeous. And so, so you can do it well, and then you can do it in ways that are shocking to people.

• 16:17Tyler Cowen?

  Which do you think are cities that do a good job incorporating greenery?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that all of them have gone through phases where they really cared and where 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

• 16:42Speaker 01

  held off, like, the most expensive real estate in the world, probably, for much of its time in 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. That's just a stunning achievement to me. And I think of that, you know, I'm, I live in the Bay Area, Golden Gate Park, similarly, the existence of it is, is kind of stunning to me.

• 17:06Tyler Cowen?

  Would Paris be better if it had such a park? Because you'd be pushing out a lot of Parisians.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, probably. It's, when you make those 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 of 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, they suffer greatly for them.

• 17:36Tyler Cowen?

  What did Jane Jacobs get wrong?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  There's a kind of dichotomy that people draw of a 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, and they're 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 worldview, in the extreme, for top-down plans that actually really do matter and are effective and make the world a better

• 18:21Speaker 01

  place. There can be a kind of historic preservationist streak in that animbiism inside of Jane Jacobs that could have a pernicious effect. It isn't present in her writing, but I think that there's a, the natural follow-through has that potential.

• 18:34Tyler Cowen?

  What would she have thought of e-bike lanes, which we now have a lot of in many places?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, probably, do they contribute to the sidewalk ballet? I'm gonna guess, I'm gonna say like, a little bit no and a little bit yes. So I don't know how she would, how she would land on, on e-bikes. I mean, yeah, I don't know. It's a good question.

• 18:54Tyler Cowen?

  And what's your view? Do they make cities uglier or more attractive? I would say uglier.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  The e-bike lanes in particular, or just the e-bikes? I mean, I do think that there's, yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  I think that streets do need to be reclaimed as a place of multimodal transportation, not just given over to cars. I think that's a good impulse. The street existed in, in human history as a place for humans and horses and, you know, like, carts and, 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 that making streets more flexible, more multimodal is a, is a good impulse. I think the bikes are fine. I think the lanes are fine, 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 a car. I like it. It's good in some environments. It's not ideal for cities in a lot of ways.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And so it's important to have different ways to, to break apart the, the mobility of a city.

• 19:51Tyler Cowen?

  The land costs a lot. What, 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 transit. There's lots of walking. Many of the streets are walking friendly. Bikes hardly play a role.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's a little bit of the, you know, culture, like, they, I mean, the good thing is, the pressure release valve that they created was 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, or really buses, is also the secret to public transit, that people don't sort of employ as much as, as they should, probably, because they're not as sexy as cool trains. Those types of things, I think, are important to, to putting together a, a patchy network that isn't as devised as, as well as it could be.

• 20:47Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  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, a kind of corporate globalism does create like, a, a brand, a style and aesthetic that's carried over in places. And there can be a kind of a soullessness to that thing, as it's, we're 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

• 21:47Speaker 01

  of all kinds of things. And so I think that's, it's hard to deny. But I do think that those, the little differences are there and present and, and they're worth paying attention to.

• 21:57Tyler Cowen?

  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. Have I changed? Did it change? Am I just too used to it? Has it gotten worse? What's your opinion?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  I think you've just gotten used to it. Style trends and what we care about in design, they do evolve. You do get bored of seeing the same thing. And, and there's an impulse to change. It's just like when we talked about with the Chrysler building. I mean, that the idea of like that ornamentation feeling of the old era and people just loving the sleekness of these new modern skyscrapers and, and loving that just like the whole utility of them and that utility represented the form. And they just like, they were in love with that. And they were in love with it 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, you know, seems like offensive. So you see this thing and you go, God, it's so beautiful.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  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 there, or you know, or something. Or like, I think the new, the new one seems to be like the clamshell. So like it opens up like a phone and gives you more real estate, but, but it's seamless looking. And I think that, 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 a, not the first one, but one of the early ones where I was like picking something out because of its beauty was a Motorola Razr phone. And I just was like, the sleekness of it, I thought was just like stunning, honestly. Trends change and people adapt. That's the way it is.

• 23:35Tyler Cowen?

  They're more robust now. You can drop them, even throw them, put them underwater. They're fine. I worry that maybe they look less sleek in the service of robustness. Now, I would prefer the robustness, in fact, but.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  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, is that being a phone is the least 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. And so as the functionality of the iPhone is quite wide, which is why the, the screen is so, 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 like, there's a, you know, 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,

• 24:32Speaker 01

  the things, these things will start to split into different devices, maybe again. So you never know.

• 24:37Tyler Cowen?

  What's the ugliest country you've been to?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  My goodness.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  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, 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, you know, 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, parts of the country. Other parts of the country

• 25:30Speaker 01

  were just 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.

• 25:42Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  I've, I've never been there. So, so I'll take your word for that.

• 25:58Tyler Cowen?

  You should go for this reason.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Let's experience ugliness first.

• 26:02Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 26:05Tyler Cowen?

  One of my favorite topics, currency design. What's your favorite currency in terms of how it looks?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  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 in 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, you know, 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. This like, 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.

• 26:50Tyler Cowen?

  I loved Swiss currency pre 2021. You know, they had Le Corbusier on, Jacques Médi, a Hoenecker. In the 1980s, they had Euler on, the mathematician. Imagine putting Euler on your country's currency.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that is a canvas that's so available to us to represent more values than we have in the United States than, than just founding fathers and presidents and stuff. And I think it's just such a wasted opportunity.

• 27:15Tyler Cowen?

  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. They announce this to the world. We're crazy.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it, there are things to love about it. I just think that it has a kind of fussiness and filigree. We're 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. Dollar has some, some charm.

• 28:11Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  It is, 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.

• 28:34Tyler Cowen?

  Should America put its power lines underground?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially in this world of climate change and, and more fires. I mean, like the, some of the biggest fires in California were started by downed 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, a cost benefit. If you can make it work. I mean, one of the things that is good is, you know, like 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 building is of premium importance. So it's really a matter of balancing those things.

• 29:17Tyler Cowen?

  How should we signal especially large speed bumps in the road? Big issue in Virginia, where I live.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Really? You just run across them and then hit them too hard?

• 29:25Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 29:36Tyler Cowen?

  And you don't always know what's coming.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  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 unbalance and unsureness is almost their goal to make you not certain how to go over them. And so therefore you go over them very, very slowly.

• 30:00Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  But uncertainty seems to be its goal, which is important in traffic devices. Sometimes uncertainty is, is a good thing because it makes people more cautious.

• 30:19Tyler Cowen?

  Like traffic circles do that way.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Traffic circles, for example. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm a big fan of the traffic circle and it's all built on anxiety. It's, it's a central principle.

• 30:28Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  This is a real conundrum because there's this chance that no language or warnings would, would make sense. There was a project of this, the WIP program to try to figure out like how to sort of signal people that were basically almost non-human in sort of 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, like a three panel comic strip of like a person who's healthy runs into radioactive material and the next panel shows them sick or dying. Like, we don't even know if people will perceive a left to right orientation in our, in our picture. So you, you really have to come up with novel ways to, to make these things

• 31:22Speaker 01

  persistent over time. And people have thought about creating folk songs. They've thought about putting radioactive responsive markers in 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 that the glowing cats are things to avoid. And maybe that persistent story would last over millennia. I mean, it's, it's an interesting and confounding problem, but people came up with really creative solutions. I mean, I think it's, it's evidenced by what, you know, we did when we discovered different tombs in, 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, it's an actual problem to think about for sure.

• 32:07Tyler Cowen?

  Or you might think there's some kind of treasure there and they're trying to scare you off because it's valuable.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. There's no way to convey like a hundred percent what you mean because places that are protected, yeah, it seemed like there's something valuable behind it. And in this case, there's nothing valuable.

• 32:22Tyler Cowen?

  A related problem. 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?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. That type of, very early on in my driving career, I kind of learned that 10 miles above the suggested limit was kind of what they were going for.

• 32:54Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I think there's some utility in me figuring that out and doing the math as I've become a better driver, a more competent driver, or know the roads better. That is, that serves some purpose. It's just that that purpose, like the sort of intention and the effect are kind of hard to calculate. So would it be better to tell people the truth?

• 33:16Tyler Cowen?

  Another rule is to double the number and subtract 10.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:19Tyler Cowen?

  That's more ambitious than your system.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I just do think that there's a certain amount, a lot of driving, at least sort of devices in 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 like 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. Like they have no idea that it's really that big. And part of that and the dashes in between lanes, most people estimate when surveyed that a dash in 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

• 34:06Speaker 01

  fast and have it not freak you out. So when you're going a 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 and 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, but also like, you know, like as people begin to game it and know that what's going on, obviously it starts to feel kind of ridiculous.

• 34:33Tyler Cowen?

  You have a very famous TED Talk on city flags and what makes for a good city flag. And you've propagated the term vexillology, the study of flags. Why should there be no lettering on flags, city flags, that is?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Because a flag is meant to be flying on a pole. And so it should be effectively work, you know, from backwards and forward. So that it's just, it's just because it has a backside that you can see. And so it's, it's not good.

• 34:59Tyler Cowen?

  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.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  But you could identify a Chicago flag if you've been to Chicago.

• 35:17Tyler Cowen?

  No, I couldn't.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Really?

• 35:17Tyler Cowen?

  I absolutely couldn't.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Oh, it's everywhere in Chicago. That's interesting.

• 35:20Tyler Cowen?

  So maybe the purpose of the flag is to signal 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?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  So my contention in that talk was, you know, like a little bit, I was just kind of making fun and having fun with the idea of, 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, they're very, very useful as a, as a municipal device. And Chicago is one of those examples where the Chicago flag is, is displayed like everywhere and different elements of it are taken apart and, and presented. And it, it actually like reinforces and feeds Chicago pride in I think a meaningful and 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 K like laid out in his vexillology handbook, it

• 36:15Speaker 01

  sort of has this positive reinforcement effect, this positive feedback loop of having pride in a city, you displaying 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, and good. And, 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, that gives you the same amount of pride and has the same amount of utility, absolutely fine. Like 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

• 36:56Speaker 01

  it is a underused thing in a city to sort of rally around, to give people pride, other than, you know, sports teams and other corporate things. Like this is a 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, and taking words off of it is, 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 it, you know, there's examples in which, I mean, mostly words I don't like at all. But like, there's examples in which things that violate flag rules in lovely and amazing ways that I think is really beautiful. Like I think Maryland's flag is really beautiful and it is held, sort of harkens back to heraldry of the, you know, like Lord Baltimore and, and Calvert. And it's super busy and it looks like a racing flag.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  And I think it's the most gorgeous, I think it's super gorgeous, you know? So you, you can do it lots of ways.

• 37:46Tyler Cowen?

  The Brazilian flag, you know, it's order me progresso, or order in progress, which sometimes is taken almost satirically, but I quite like it.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  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 worth the 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 Independence Days around the world and various things that are happening in my life. If I want to visit someplace, I'll sometimes put a flag up beforehand. And I just think that 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, is an amazing flag.

• 38:30Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's the thing. I went there to talk to them about their flag. So I called them out as having the worst flag. I mean, the Nava survey identified as the worst flag in the country. And I, I called them out in this TED Talk. I was really just kind of having fun with it. And they got in touch and they wanted to redesign the flag. And, and the truth of the matter is that flag, it was only official flag in sort of the most barest 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 of that it wasn't made for that because it has like a trademark symbol on it and it has 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, I met one of the, the sort of city leaders and, and he was like, he was like, I have to thank you for

• 39:27Speaker 01

  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 really meant 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 the neighborhood of 250 or 300 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.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  And even if we're at 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, I like that as an organizing principle of people's lives and their sense of pride. You know, like I, I love sports too, but like over sports teams, our office is in Oakland. Our office was in Oakland 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, or the Warriors playing in the stadium here. So.

• 40:42Tyler Cowen?

  How well designed is your own studio by your own account?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  My own studio?

• 40:46Tyler Cowen?

  Your own studio?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  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, 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 soft scape. So it dampens the sound and I love my studio. It's great. I have a 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.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And I have a wife and six children live here, or at least they, 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, 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.

• 41:49Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think are the advantages of doing a podcast or radio show about visual objects, but the show itself is audio only?

• 41:57Speaker 01

  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, you know, like 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 that there's something about, when I was developing the show, you know, 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

• 42:42Speaker 01

  and do and surround ourselves with.

• 42:43Tyler Cowen?

  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?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Unusual.

• 42:57Tyler Cowen?

  So if you said, oh, I wake up early every morning, not everyone does it, but it's not unusual, right?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think what, 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 like everyone got paid and all sorts of, so all those things that I think people think they'll, they'll go

• 43:46Speaker 01

  like, well, did, was it bad when you couldn't, 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, I think I was very, 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 no part of it is like outside of my scope. No part of it is too small to bear attention. I think that, I think that's it, but I don't think that's unusual necessarily.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  But that's, I think that's kind of the secret to my success. And the other part of my success is I, I try to lead with kindness first. And I, the people who work with me, Delaney Hall is our senior editor on NPI. Like I hired Delaney out of college in 2005 and we've worked together in different parts and they, she's gone to another show and come back. And I think I've created a culture where the, where the people together, work together, are kind and tender with each other. And I think, I think it's really, really important to, to making a thing because we make things that's an expression of, 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.

• 45:09Tyler Cowen?

  Great answer. Roman Mars, thank you very much.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

• 45:15Tyler Cowen?

  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 at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.