Pod Insights Revisionist History Revenge of "A Good Walk Spoiled" About this episode Ten years ago, Malcolm inveighed against the exclusive country clubs of Los Angeles in an episode of Revisionist History called "A Good Walk Spoiled." This November, thanks to a Los Angeles City Council member who heard the episode, Los Angeles voters will have the opportunity to take up Malcolm's cause. Today, Malcolm revisits "A Good Walk Spoiled," and speaks with Councilmember Adrin Nazarian about his proposed ballot measure.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Malcolm Gladwell? Bushkin.
1:10 Malcolm Gladwell? Every writer lives in fear of one thing, that what they say won't matter. You toil away in obscurity, you scrub your prose until it's shiny and perfect, you put your work out for the world to see, and in the back of your mind is always the thought that all that effort will sink quietly into the sea, like a corpse whited down with concrete shoes.
1:32 Malcolm Gladwell? Have I had this fear? Oh, yes. Worse, I've seen it happen to me again and again. There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with the relative age effect, wrote about it, did episodes about it on this very podcast. You look at a room full of third graders or fifth graders and you say, Tommy is a poor student, Alice is a good one. But what if Alice was born in January and Tommy was born in December, and what looks like superior ability on Alice's part is actually just the fact that she's a year older than Tommy? And a year's extra maturity at the age of eight is a really, really big deal.
2:10 Malcolm Gladwell? I made this argument until I was hoarse. And what did I want? I wanted elementary and middle schools to divide up their students by birth month. So the oldest kids would be in one class, and those born in the middle months would be in another class, and the youngest kids would be in a class by themselves, and the playing field could be leveled. Did any school superintendent ever call me up and say, "I love your idea. I've reorganized my kids by birth month"? No, never. My own daughter is going to kindergarten this fall, and some part of me wanted to ask her principal, "Can she be in a class with all the other kids born at the same time as her"? But I didn't. And you know why? Because I'm demoralized. Because this fixation of mine,
2:55 Malcolm Gladwell? this beautiful, radical, provocative idea that I put out into the world, sank quietly into the sea like a weighted corpse. I had all but given up until, like an angel descending from heaven, came Audre Nusantara. Los Angeles City Council member and Revisionist History listener.
3:21 Malcolm Gladwell? Thank you for doing this.
3:24 Speaker 00 Thank you for inviting me.
3:25 Malcolm Gladwell? No, no. So I was delighted to hear that you are the author, the instigator of a proposal to be put before the voters of Los Angeles.
3:39 Speaker 00 Well, you were the instigator.
3:41 Malcolm Gladwell? I was the instigator. Well, I was the provocateur. I just raise issues. Others have to make them actually happen. So could you tell me, how did you come across my podcast?
3:58 Speaker 00 So one of my staff members brought this to my
4:01 Malcolm Gladwell? And said, "You gotta hear this." "Council member, you gotta hear this." And did he hear this? Oh, yes, he did.
4:12 Malcolm Gladwell? My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Later this week, we're going to be dropping the first of our epic five-episode blockbuster, The Staten Island Problem. But before we do, as a little amuse-bouche, we're going to revisit one of my all-time favorite episodes in the Revisionist History canon from 10 years ago, A Good Walk Spoiled.
4:40 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm going to play it for you now, in case you need a little refresher. And then I'm going to come back at the end and tell you how, finally, a decade into Revisionist History, somebody listened.
4:57 Malcolm Gladwell? I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. He has a little pool house in his backyard, and I stay there whenever I come to LA, kind of like Cato Calan, if your memory for OJ Simpson esoterica goes back that far.
5:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Anyway, my friend's street dead ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central east-west corridors in LA. And on the other side of San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course, one of the many private country clubs that LA is famous for. If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, 10 minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider your application.
5:48 Malcolm Gladwell? There's Bel Air Country Club just north of UCLA, which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country. Hillcrest off Pico, Wilshire Country Club in Hancock Park. I could go on. They're everywhere. Vast, gorgeous, and private.
6:06 Malcolm Gladwell? The one near my friend's house is called Brentwood Country Club, and it has a tall, chain-link fence around it, which goes almost all the way out to the street, leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track. There's no sidewalk. And since there aren't a lot of places to run in Los Angeles, tons of people run around the Brentwood Country Club on that narrow dirt track.
6:31 Malcolm Gladwell? And there's one thing that always bothers me every time I run that route. Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there's a huge, magnificent park just on the other side of the fence? My name is Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
7:00 Malcolm Gladwell? This episode is about the problem with golf. I hate golf. And hopefully, by the end of this, you'll hate golf, too.
7:16 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm standing here with Di, Di Zock, who is a very successful landscape architect in Santa Monica. And we're on the corner of San Vicente and Burlingame, and we're looking into the Brenwood Country Club. And the first thing I see is barbed wire.
7:34 Speaker 03 Looks like a couple of layers of barbed wire.
7:37 Malcolm Gladwell? This looks like a, it looks like the Berlin Wall.
7:39 Speaker 03 I don't think they want us to get in there.
7:41 Malcolm Gladwell? What are you, what are we seeing? We're seeing, let's move a little closer here. What's that stand of trees? Do you know what those are?
7:48 Speaker 03 That looks like silk oaks in the foreground, and then I see a sederis deadora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees, which are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little open space.
8:02 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
8:02 Speaker 03 There's some Pinus canariensis, looks like a redwood in there.
8:07 Malcolm Gladwell? I don't think Di Zock has ever played a round of golf in her life. That's exactly why I wanted her opinion. I wanted someone objective to tell me what it would take to turn this place into a park.
8:18 Speaker 03 Well, first of all, I would get rid of the two layers of barbed wire.
8:23 Malcolm Gladwell? We were, the whole Eastern European feel, Eastern German feel would have to be corrected.
8:28 Speaker 03 I mean, that might be some people's bag, but it's not very welcoming.
8:34 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah.
8:39 Malcolm Gladwell? The typical golf course is 200 acres, give or take. That's a lot of land. You have to landscape it, mow it, drench it in pesticides, keep the sand traps perfect. I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds its bunkers, it typically takes about 389 truckloads of sand. 389, just to keep everything nice and white and fluffy. But at the same time, because golf involves launching a potentially lethal projectile at great speeds across enormous distances, you have to severely limit the number of people on the course at any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle no more than 72 golfers at once.
9:20 Malcolm Gladwell? So that's one golfer per 120,833 square feet. Can you imagine if basketball had the same population density as golf? I did the math. If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf, a basketball court would be 30 acres. Picture that. They'd have to play on motorcycles.
9:46 Malcolm Gladwell? Okay. Another fact about golf. Rich people really, really like it. They're obsessed with it, in a way that there just isn't any parallel for ordinary people. Because serious golfers are super anal about their scores, we can actually quantify their obsession. In order to calculate their handicap, basically how well they're playing relative to other people at the country club, they all post their results on a database maintained by the United States Golf Association. So we have a record, and it's a goldmine.
10:16 Speaker 04 To be able to calculate your handicap and track it through time, you will log into the system either at your course or on your home computer.
10:25 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm talking to an economist at Miami University named Lee Biggerstaff. He's interested in the habits of top corporate executives. If you have the corner office and a multimillion dollar stock option and a Gulfstream V, does that make you more or less likely to put in a hard day's work? The USGA database is of serious professional interest to a guy like Biggerstaff.
10:46 Speaker 04 And you input where you played and what day you played on and what your score was. And after a certain number of rounds being played, the USGA will indicate what your handicap is, your level of skill, which allows you to compete against other golfers of different skill level and kind of normalize against that.
11:04 Malcolm Gladwell? You know how you always hear that CEOs play a lot of golf? Biggerstaff's insight is that the USGA database allows us to know exactly how much they play. All you need to do is cross-reference that list of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's largest companies. So that's what he does. It takes forever, by the way.
11:23 Speaker 04 It was started while I was a PhD student, and so this certainly was a multi-month process. So it's not something the Niners want to repeat in the near term, just because it took a lot of collection time there.
11:33 Malcolm Gladwell? How can you not love this? Surely this is why God invented graduate students. Biggerstaff begins with the names of the heads of the top 1,500 publicly held companies in the US. 363 of those 1,500 turn out to be so obsessed with golf that they enter their scores into the USGA database.
11:52 Speaker 04 What you're seeing on average is, I think, 15 rounds a year is kind of the average CEOs playing that amount of golf. But it's a heavily skewed distribution, right? So we have a lot of people that are playing very little golf. And then we have a tail where we're picking it up, you know, the top quartile of what we're looking at, which is 22 or more rounds per year.
12:10 Malcolm Gladwell? And if you go to the top 10% of Biggerstaff's sample, the CEOs are playing around at least 37 times a year.
12:22 Malcolm Gladwell? A round of golf is a good four, four and a half hours. So if you play 37 times a year, that's more than 160 hours on the course. The equivalent of five and a half weeks of work.
12:34 Malcolm Gladwell? And by the way, these are understatements. They don't include the time spent driving to the course, warming up, getting changed, having a drink. Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots on the putting green or the driving range, or all the rounds you play that you don't enter into the database, like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a fun round. So the real time is probably way higher. Biggerstaff then goes on to show that the more golf a CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and also that the more golf a CEO plays, the more likely he is to be fired. In other words, this isn't a harmless habit. It's a dangerous habit. Remember the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns? They went bankrupt during the mortgage crisis.
13:18 Malcolm Gladwell? In July of 2007, right when the crisis was beginning, the CEO of Bear Stearns would often helicopter out from Wall Street on Friday afternoons to his exclusive course in New Jersey to get a round in before sunset. Even when his company was collapsing, he couldn't stop playing golf.
13:38 Malcolm Gladwell? Out of President Donald Trump's first four months in office, he visited his own golf courses 25 times. One week, he played three times. You would think he would be at the office, learning how to be president, reading intelligence briefings, draining the swamp. No, he's golfing. It's an addiction, right? Because the definition of an addiction is a self-destructive habit. Just think if I said to you that an important employee of a major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to miss enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put his own career in jeopardy, you would say, whoa, check that guy into rehab. That's golf. Crack cocaine for rich white guys.
14:20 Speaker 04 The highest in the sample, 146 or 148 rounds recorded in a single year, which, I mean, at that point, that's a tremendous amount of time spent on the golf course.
14:30 Malcolm Gladwell? You thought I was engaging in hyperbole, didn't you? That I was using the word addiction metaphorically. 148 rounds a year is a round of golf every three days.
14:41 Speaker 04 And that would be if it was kind of uniformly distributed across the year. Golf certainly has a season where it's a little bit more intense in terms of the summer versus the winter.
14:51 Malcolm Gladwell? Wait, and you can't tell me what company it is? I want to know what company it is.
14:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, with this data, given it's somewhat sensitive, we're unwilling to name out CEOs.
15:05 Malcolm Gladwell? I can't believe you won't tell me. I mean, here we have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is organized in just about the most extravagant manner possible. And at the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive, to the point that there's a chief executive out there of a major American corporation who plays an average of 148 rounds of golf a year, and is so completely unself-conscious about that fact that he posts all 148 rounds on a public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students. So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous costly obsession? Do they burn through their life savings paying for their addiction like ordinary addicts do? Please, give them a little more respect.
15:51 Speaker 00 By the way, this is my 15th year in television. Imagine that, 15 years of me.
15:57 Speaker 00 It's the longest stomach test in the history of show business.
16:01 Speaker 05 You could argue, I would say, in the 40s and 50s, there was no one who was more widely popular in America than Bob Hope.
16:08 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm talking to Richard Zoglin, Bob Hope's biographer. I think Bob Hope has been a little forgotten in recent years, but in his day, he was huge.
16:17 Speaker 05 Every late-night comedian who does a stand-up monologue at the beginning of the show owes a debt to Bob Hope, because he kind of invented that thing, a stand-up comedy monologue that sort of took note of what was going on in the world, what was going on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, and he was just the voice of America, I think, for a long time.
16:38 Malcolm Gladwell? Bob Hope is a crucial part of the story of golf in America. Although, I'm warning you, things are going to get a little complicated. Which is sort of the point, because you don't get to run the world for as long as rich white guys have without being pretty wily. And some of their best and wiliest work has been on the golf course. So there's a principle in property tax law called highest and best use, which is that one of the ways you figure out how much to tax a piece of property is to estimate what its best use might be. For example, if I have a one acre plot in the fanciest part of Manhattan that I use to grow vegetables, I can't say to the city, "That land is worthless. It's just a vegetable garden." No.
17:22 Malcolm Gladwell? The city's going to say, "We're going to value that one acre and tax it as if it had an apartment block on it." Because that's the best use of land in the fancy parts of Manhattan. Now, if you've got a vast golf course in the middle of Beverly Hills or Brentwood, highest and best use makes you really nervous. Because plainly, the highest and best use of land in the middle of one of the most expensive and densely populated cities in the world is not a private golf course. So years ago, in 1960, California's country clubs realized they have to act, or they're going to get taxed into oblivion. They get together and they propose an amendment to the state constitution that permanently exempts them from the highest and best use standard.
18:05 Malcolm Gladwell? They want their vegetable garden to be taxed as a vegetable garden. If you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private golf courses are these massive, opulent gated playgrounds, and membership is often restricted. In Los Angeles in 1960, a lot of these clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly didn't let in black people, except to work in the kitchen. Yet, they wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes, like they were some kind of public amenity. How can they argue this? They don't. Not really. They just bring in Bob Hope, who in addition to being the most popular entertainer in America, is also an obsessive golfer. Obsessive. I might as well level with you.
18:50 Malcolm Gladwell? I spent so much time in sand traps, they sent me citizenship.
18:52 Speaker 06 Paper from Saudi Arabia.
18:54 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, see here, I love to hear the whole thrilling story. Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to his golf game called Confessions of a Hooker, in which he estimates that he had played on 2,000 different golf courses over the course of his life.
19:09 Speaker 05 He belonged to the Lakeside Country Club in L.A., near where he lived.
19:13 Malcolm Gladwell? Which is one of the prestigious.
19:15 Speaker 05 Yes.
19:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Prestigious, to this day, isn't it?
19:17 Speaker 05 I think so, yeah.
19:19 Malcolm Gladwell? The genius of picking Bob Hope as the face of California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act, was about being every man. He's self-deprecating. Half his jokes are about how he's not part of the in-group, even though, of course, there's no one more in than Bob Hope.
19:35 Speaker 06 Isn't this wonderful, though, being here in California? I just love it. Look at that sky. It's the only place in the world where you can get four seasons in one day, I want to tell you that. This is divine. We better hurry, we'll be, it'll be snowing before the third hole, you know. Let's move on, old boy.
19:50 Malcolm Gladwell? So how did the Bob Hope for Golf campaign do in 1960? It wins. The proposition passes and is added to Article 13 of the California Constitution, where it remains to this day. In order to win a set of privileges for the very wealthy, in other words, California's country clubs turn to a man who symbolizes the common man. I mean, when does it ever happen that a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich golf buddies by posing as a friend of the common man? If you get my drift.
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21:50 Malcolm Gladwell? Take me back, just so I totally understand Prop 13. Prop 13 is passed in 1978. And what are the principal stipulations of the proposition?
22:03 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm in a big conference room in the Los Angeles County Municipal Building, one of those beautiful 1930s office buildings that are all over downtown Los Angeles. There are four people on the other side of the table. They're from the LA County Tax Assessor's Office. I'm on my quest to figure out why Brentwood Country Club isn't just a big park that I can go running through. And I've decided to start with the people who run the tax system. These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They have promised to help me. You'll have to guess what they really think.
22:36 Speaker 06 The tax rate is set as 1% of the value as opposed to a variable rate, which it was before.
22:42 Malcolm Gladwell? The man speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's talking about the most famous amendment to the California Constitution, Proposition 13.
22:50 Speaker 06 The properties only get reassessed with when there's a transfer or a change of ownership. Or there's new construction. Those are the primary parts of it.
23:00 Malcolm Gladwell? Here's what he's saying. If you own a house, every one or two years typically, the value of your property is reassessed by the city or county where you live. So if your house doubles in value, the local government will raise your taxes accordingly. That's the way property taxes work, except in California. Proposition 13 said that for tax purposes, the value of any piece of property in California is frozen at pre-1978 levels. And the only way that property can be reassessed at its real current value is if the property is sold, or to be more specific, if ownership of more than 50% of the property changes hands. In other words, California has two kinds of taxpayers.
23:43 Malcolm Gladwell? The post-1978 people who pay normal property taxes and the people lucky and old enough to be living in the same house they owned in 1978, who pay a tiny fraction of their fair share.
23:56 Speaker 06 You know, I've got family members who've owned their house since 1969. And they're paying, I think their taxable value is about $90,000 or something like that. The houses in that neighborhood sell for 600. So they're paying a lot less. It's the Prop 13 conundrum, which I'm sure you've read about.
24:18 Malcolm Gladwell? Please understand, this system is insane. Totally crazy. I mean, just think of all the reasons why someone might deserve a big tax break. I mean, they're sick, they're poor, they have tons of young kids, they've made a big investment in their business. The state of California says, no. We think the most deserving group are people whose property hasn't changed hands in 40 years. Okay. Now imagine that you're a private golf club. You did that spectacular bit of jujitsu with Bob Hope in 1960, which means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift from God number one. Then comes Proposition 13, and you get a second gift from God.
24:59 Malcolm Gladwell? Because Proposition 13 says that those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen forever at 1978 levels, so long as your country club does not change hands. And that last part is crucial, because if you have a change in ownership, then you have to pay real property tax, like every other long-suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one place since 1978. So the country clubs of Los Angeles all hang by a thread. They continue to exist, only so long as the tax system perceives that they have not changed hands.
25:42 Malcolm Gladwell? And for years, everyone assumes they haven't changed hands. I mean, Brentwood, LA Country Club, Wilshire, all the major golf clubs were all founded before 1978. But then, a neighborhood newspaper called the Los Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article, January 16, 2010, in which they say, wait a minute. Most private country clubs in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're owned by their members. When you're admitted, you get a share. When you die or quit, someone else takes your share. So over time, if enough members die or quit, isn't that a change in ownership?
26:24 Malcolm Gladwell? That question was put to Rick Auerbach, who was then the head of tax assessment for LA County. I think the quote was kind of funny for him. He said something about, let's see, on most issues, we have heard at least the question asked before. He said he'd worked in the office 39 years, but this was a new one. Auerbach refers the question to the city's lawyers. They put their best and brightest legal minds on it for six months. And on June 2, 2010, the county's tax court issues a solemn four-page ruling. They conclude, no, country clubs haven't changed hands. If you're keeping track, that's the third straight-up gift from God that LA's private country clubs have gotten in the last 50 years. I was talking to someone who's a member of Bella Country Club, and I said,
27:09 Malcolm Gladwell? What percentage of the members of Bel-Air today were members in 78? And he said, you know, 10%. So why isn't that a change of ownership?
27:19 Speaker 06 Right. If I haven't had a chance to dig through this a whole lot since I got it out of the file the other day. But they kind of get into it. It's they're saying if there's no one event that is that is more than 50% of a transfer, then it's not each of those little individual slices are not a change of ownership on their own.
27:39 Malcolm Gladwell? Did you find that argument plausible?
27:42 Speaker 06 Well, it's Yeah, that's that's We are implementers of the law.
27:48 Malcolm Gladwell? You don't have opinions.
27:49 Speaker 06 No. Well.
27:51 Malcolm Gladwell? I could swear, as I looked across the table at Donnelly and his cohorts, that they were twitching like they desperately wanted to say something, but had to bite their tongue. You know what it's like? You know that famous paradox? I forgot with the ship. Were you? The question is, if you change, if you have a ship and you change, it's like some ancient Greek thing. And you change one board at a time. Is at the end of the day, is the ship different?
28:16 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
28:17 Malcolm Gladwell? That's what this is. The thing I can't remember is the ship of Theseus, the famous thought experiment described by the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly 2,000 years ago.
28:29 Malcolm Gladwell? Plutarch says, imagine Theseus is sailing on a ship. And one by one, he replaces every one of the original planks that make up that ship with a new plank, until every single piece of the ship is new. The question is, when Theseus reaches shore, is he sailing on the same ship as he was when he left? Or a new ship? One view says it's a new ship. This is called the mereological theory of identity. The identity of something is the sum of its component parts. Change the parts, you change the thing. On the other side of the argument is something called spatio-temporal continuity theory, which says that an object can maintain its identity so long as the change is gradual
29:12 Malcolm Gladwell? and the form or shape of the object is preserved through the changes of its component materials. I think you can see where I'm going with this. The city's lawyers take a second view. So long as a country club replaces its rich white guys gradually, and so long as each new rich white guy preserves the form and shape of the rich white guy he is replacing, then the private golf clubs of today must have the same existential status as the private golf courses of 1978. Collections of rich white guys, from the standpoint of the LA County property tax system, possess spatio-temporal continuity.
29:53 Malcolm Gladwell? At this point, I realized I was in way over my head. Tax assessors were not going to be enough. I needed an actual philosopher. So I called Mark Cohen of the University of Washington to get to the bottom of the question of whether large groups of rich white people possess ontological permanence.
30:13 Speaker 00 Here's an argument that favors the spatio-temporal continuity theory. The idea that what makes the ship persist through time as one and the same is that it moves smoothly through spacetime. One plank is removed and thrown overboard, and a replacement plank is installed, taken from the cargo the ship has onboard. So when it arrives, it doesn't have a single part that is identical to any of the parts it started out with. And so there's no point at which you can say, aha, now we have a new ship, a different, a numerically different ship.
30:51 Speaker 00 If you have that sort of argument in mind, you think, OK, the spatio-temporal continuity criterion is the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts are the same.
31:01 Malcolm Gladwell? But Cohen is not finished. As a philosopher, his job is to consider all the scenarios raised by the ship of Theseus conundrum, like the museum counter example.
31:11 Speaker 00 The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is in a museum of ancient ships. And a gang of crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship. And it realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece. They would easily be spotted. So they come up with a clever scheme.
31:30 Malcolm Gladwell? They sneak in every night and steal the ship one board at a time, one plank a day, so the museum doesn't realize what's going on.
31:38 Speaker 00 By the time they're finished, on day number N, they have all N parts of the ship removed. Now they reassemble them and put it on the black market. They're selling Theseus's ancient ship for a pretty price. And they've left a replica behind in the museum. I contend that in this case, when you describe it in this way, it seems as if Theseus's ship has been stolen piecemeal from the museum.
32:09 Malcolm Gladwell? Cohen's point is that there's no simple answer to the ship of Theseus problem. You can go around and around and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do you see what the lawyers at the L.A. Board of Equalization did? They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that has bedeviled some of the best minds in the world for 2,000 years and declare victory and say, oh, it's definitely option one, spatio-temporal continuity.
32:38 Speaker 00 The problem as it stands is irresolvable. And you only come to a conclusion that makes any sense to you if you place it in a context in which there is something sort of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic that helps, that tilts you in one direction or the other.
33:00 Malcolm Gladwell? So what's the pragmatic, extra metaphysical consideration here? It's that Los Angeles ranks near the bottom of all major metropolitan areas in the United States in terms of public parks. There's Griffith Park, off in the northeastern corner of the city, which only a fraction of the city can even get to. And then there's basically nothing, except these massive golf courses, which are both closed to the general public and subsidized by the general public. Do you want to know the size of that subsidy? I asked around. A guy I know knows a guy who's a member of the L.A. Country Club. That guy's back-of-the-envelope calculation was that the club's land was worth about $6 billion. But that was a couple of years ago.
33:42 Malcolm Gladwell? Then I heard from another guy, who said that they now think it's worth $9 billion. $9 billion! Under normal circumstances, the property taxes on that much land would come to about $90 million a year. Do you know what L.A. Country Club actually paid? After you add up the Bob Hope exemption and the spatio-temporal continuity ruling? $200,000, give or take. All right, let's do the math together. They should be paying $90 million. In fact, they're only paying $200,000 in property taxes. $90 million minus $200,000 is $89,800,000.
34:22 Malcolm Gladwell? That's how much the taxpayers of Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest country clubs in the world every year. Well, now, I wanted to bring up something else that comes to mind here, which is that the spatial-temporal argument, taken out of philosophical context, strikes me as being can sometimes be really troubling. For example, it's a very, I mean, I think there's something fundamentally intuitive about it, and I don't mean that necessarily in a good way, that it, you know, that we get the fact that we call the Hudson River the Hudson River, even though the Hudson River is at every second changing.
35:07 Malcolm Gladwell? It's like, you know, the waters are the same. Boats go down it, you know, it's never, it never looks the same way twice ever, but we continue to call it the Hudson River. But it strikes me that in, in a political context, this kind of thinking can be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice.
35:26 Speaker 00 Interesting.
35:28 Malcolm Gladwell? For example, what is the, what is an aristocracy but a political formulation of the spatial-temporal?
35:35 Malcolm Gladwell? Continuity principle, right?
35:38 Speaker 00 It is something like that.
35:39 Malcolm Gladwell? And it's troubling in precisely that way because they're saying circumstances can change and the holders of the privilege can change. The father can die and the son can inherit the peerage. But the peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's independent of all that's going around it. And that's...
35:59 Speaker 00 Yes. Where the identity of the object confers, for example, a right or a title, and if it's considered to be held intact and in full by whoever holds it at any one time, then basically that removes change altogether from the realm of what matters as far as ownership is concerned.
36:24 Malcolm Gladwell? Yes.
36:25 Speaker 00 So the 17th great grandson of the peer still has all of the rights and privileges, even though so far removed from the rights and privileges as they attach to the original holder of them. So there is something that is unfair and anti-egalitarian about the way this principle can get applied.
36:52 Malcolm Gladwell? So the golf clubs of Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions?
36:59 Speaker 00 Exactly.
37:05 Malcolm Gladwell? I think someone needs to tell Brentwood and LA Country Club and all the others that if they want to hold spatio-temporal continuity privileges, they have to give something back. Take down your barbed wire. Your members can play golf on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong to the ordinary taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come and enjoy the greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing for generations. It's worth remembering, by the way, that the most famous golf course in the world, the home of golf, St. Andrews in Scotland, is open to the general public on Sundays. In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale Country Club, right in the middle of the city, but the golf course is only private in the summer.
37:49 Malcolm Gladwell? The rest of the time, it's open to anyone who wants to go for a walk, or play frisbee, or go cross-country skiing. Canada and the United Kingdom, I would point out, are governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy. But somehow, they've figured out a way to have their fancy golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner of San Vicente and Burlingame that golf remains an instrument of medieval privilege.
38:15 Speaker 03 I mean, when you fly over L.A., the green space that you see is cemeteries and golf courses. You don't see parks. We don't have a park like, say, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or New York's... Central Park. Central Park.
38:32 Malcolm Gladwell? Dyzak and I are standing outside the barbed wire of Brentwood Country Club, peering through a fence. We're trying to spot one of the privileged few permitted a walk in the park on the west side of L.A.
38:42 Speaker 03 I see one guy. I see one.
38:47 Malcolm Gladwell? That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon, sun is now coming out.
38:51 Speaker 03 Yep.
38:52 Malcolm Gladwell? Like, wait now, we're standing on the running track, and there's someone running up right now. There are more people on this narrow dirt track than there are typically on the golf course. Let me see if we can still see any kind of... I'm still looking for a golfer.
39:11 Speaker 03 I'm not... Oh, I see one.
39:14 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, you see one?
39:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:16 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, that's very exciting.
39:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
39:19 Malcolm Gladwell? Next time, I'm climbing the fence. Maybe we all should.
39:30 Malcolm Gladwell? That episode dropped on June 15, 2017. 10 years later, almost to the month, one of Audre Nazarian's staffers comes to him and says, "You should listen." So he does. When we come back, all hell breaks loose.
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41:07 Malcolm Gladwell? Adrien Nazarian, it turns out, had for a long time asked himself the same question I asked myself whenever I went to Los Angeles, which is, how on earth do these massive golf courses on some of the most expensive land in the world afford their property taxes? And after listening to that episode from 2017, he finally had his answer. Because, basically, they don't pay property taxes. The six major LA country clubs sit on land worth conservatively $15 billion. You know how much they pay in property taxes in a typical year? Less than $1 million.
41:47 Malcolm Gladwell? And thus enlightened, he decided to act and introduce a ballot proposition.
41:55 Malcolm Gladwell? So tell me, what does your proposal... Tell me exactly what your proposal says, how you would like to address this problem. The proposal was meant to be a conversation starter and to force this issue. So what my...
42:11 Speaker 00 My team came up with was to look at maybe a $4 proposal per square foot parcel tax,
42:23 Speaker 00 which does not contradict the state's Prop 13 requirement. It's a local city-based parcel tax. And the goal of the $4 per square foot was to make it almost commensurate to what a 1% property tax valuation for best and highest use would have produced.
42:47 Malcolm Gladwell? So back of the envelope calculation, what would a club like LA Country Club be paying every year under your proposal?
42:57 Speaker 00 It depends. Oh, if it was at $4, I don't even know if they would be able to pay. They would shut down.
43:04 Malcolm Gladwell? Yeah, yeah. Let's do the math. The Los Angeles Country Club, the LACC, as it's called, the fanciest and most exclusive of all Los Angeles country clubs, occupies roughly 325 acres. That's just over 14 million square feet. A $4 a square foot tax comes to roughly $55 million a year in property taxes. Right now, membership dues for the LACC total somewhere around $20 million a year. Under the Nazarian ballot proposal, they'd have to triple their fees just to pay their property taxes.
43:42 Malcolm Gladwell? Now, technically, could all the millionaires and millionaires who belong to the LA Country Club afford that? Sure. But everything we know about very rich people is that they don't like to pay market rates for things they've previously got for free. For the well-heeled golfers of Beverly Hills, then, this is existential.
44:03 Malcolm Gladwell? In May, Nazarian put his proposal on the ballot for November. Let the voters of Los Angeles decide. Did you have a, you must have done polling.
44:12 Speaker 00 We did do polling because we wanted to not just make assumptions and understand that we actually have something that the public would feel strongly about. And in our initial polling, from a reputable pollster, we saw a 64% approval rating. So it's pretty strong.
44:34 Malcolm Gladwell? Oh, you, so these guys had a reason to be scared.
44:38 Speaker 00 Again, these are all folks that are part of the fabric of the city. So they understand that something like this would be seen as a populist issue and would garner quite a bit of support. They understand that.
44:56 Malcolm Gladwell? The country clubs freaked out. Someone, I'm not going to say who, who is a member of the LACC, forwarded me an email sent to him by the club's board of directors. Here is what it said. "We want you to know that we are taking this matter very seriously. We are confident that we have the right people with the right experience engaged to address this issue on our collective behalf. While we won't get into specific details of our approach in a broadly distributed communication, please be assured that we are actively and thoughtfully engaged." In case you were wondering, these are all rich people euphemisms for, "We're going to the mattresses on this one."
45:38 Malcolm Gladwell? An entire busload of white shoe lawyers just pulled up downstairs. We've locked the gates. We've stocked up on enough wagyu beef and 40 years single malt to fortify us until November.
45:50 Malcolm Gladwell? But then, the email continues. "In the meantime, if you have particular expertise, insight, or relationships that you believe may be relevant to this situation, we encourage you to reach out to our general manager."
46:06 Malcolm Gladwell? Which is rich people euphemism for, we're totally panicking right now. We wish we'd said yes to that membership application 20 years ago, from Donald Trump. So the clubs get together, tell Nazarian they want to negotiate. He puts the ballot measure on hold, but then the second fanciest club in the city, Bel Air Country Club, says, no, we're going to fight. I have to confess that I didn't know there was such a thing as a society of golf historians, but there is, and they wade in. What the city of Los Angeles seems to overlook is that the preservation of these clubs should be viewed in much the same way we preserve great works of art.
46:49 Malcolm Gladwell? Their importance is no less significant than a Frank Lloyd Wright home or the value of a Picasso painting. The artists behind them are equally important, and their canvas is a living, breathing landscape that requires stewardship, investment, and at times thoughtful restoration. The tabloids get wind of the story. It makes page six. Twitter blows up. My friend emails me again. They are throwing their nine irons at me at the LACC. It's chaos. It's rich white guy on rich white guy violence. But play with me for a moment. Last time I was in LA, I went to the top of...
47:33 Malcolm Gladwell? I wanted to see LA Country Club from high up, so I went to the top of the Waldorf, that little restaurant there, and looked down and said, this is an astonishing piece of property. And if they came back to you, suppose, I was thinking, what are the things? Suppose they came back and said, all right, they have two parcels on either side of Wilshire, right? Am I right? Yes. What if they said, okay, we'll give you one of those parcels for a park if you let us keep the other for our country club? Who says no?
48:10 Speaker 00 Well, I like how you're thinking. And if this is a precursor to how the negotiations go, then that's a good place to be.
48:19 Malcolm Gladwell? While you're doing these negotiations, can I make a personal request?
48:24 Speaker 00 Please.
48:26 Malcolm Gladwell? The whole, I think I explained this in the podcast. The whole thing that got me going on this is I would stay with a friend of mine in Brentwood and go running around the Brentwood Country Club on that little, narrow, rocky gravel path that is between the fence of the Brentwood Country Club and the street. And I would always say, they have whatever, 300 acres, and there's no one on their 300 acres, and I'm being forced to run on this narrow track all I want. Can they just move their fence? Audrey, could they just move their fence in three feet so that the runners of Brentwood would have a nice path as opposed to running on like a thing of rocks?
49:08 Malcolm Gladwell? Can you make it, just say, just say Malcolm wants you to move your fence in three feet and we can talk.
49:17 Malcolm Gladwell? But that, it goes to-
49:18 Speaker 00 And then afterwards, we'll name it the Malcolm Path.
49:21 Malcolm Gladwell? So that's where we are, dear listeners. A revolt on the verdant greens of Los Angeles, sparked by yours truly, in combination with a city council member who is now my hero. And next time you're in Los Angeles and happen to drive by any of those fancy golf clubs, LACC, Bel Air, Brentwood, Hillcrest, Lakeside, lower your window, raise your middle finger, honk your horn, and shout out, "I stand with Glavel in this area and mother..."
49:55 Malcolm Gladwell? And if anyone ever tells you, "The truth cannot be spoken to power," you should answer, "Actually, that's not true." May I direct you to season two, episode 10 of Revisionist History?
50:17 Malcolm Gladwell? Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Hafry. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Special thanks to the newest member of our team, Isaac Scribner. And extra special thanks to the people who worked on the original A Good Walk Spoiled: Mia Labelle, Julia Barton, Camille Baptista, and Stephanie Daniel. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira.
50:50 Malcolm Gladwell? I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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51:31 Malcolm Gladwell? This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight with Jason Timp. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which can mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
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