Speaker 1: Pushkin. I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on
Speaker 1: the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and
Speaker 1: Santa Monica. He is a little poolhouse in his backyard
Speaker 1: and I stay there whenever I come to LA, kind
Speaker 1: of like cato'calon if your memory for O. J. Simpson
Speaker 1: Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway, my friend's street dead
Speaker 1: ends on San Vicente Boulevard, one of the central east
Speaker 1: west corridors in LA. And on the other side of
Speaker 1: San Vicente is this absolutely gorgeous golf course, one of
Speaker 1: the many private country clubs at LA is famous for.
Speaker 1: If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, ten
Speaker 1: minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million
Speaker 1: dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider
Speaker 1: your application. There's bel Air Country Club just north of Ucla,
Speaker 1: which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country.
Speaker 1: Hillcraft Staff Pico Wiltshire country Club in Hancock Park. I
Speaker 1: could go on. They're everywhere, vast, gorgeous and private. The
Speaker 1: one near my friend's house is called Brentwood country Club
Speaker 1: and it has a tall chain link fence around it
Speaker 1: which goes almost all the way out to the street,
Speaker 1: leaving just this narrow, rocky dirt track. There's no sidewalk,
Speaker 1: and since there aren't a lot of places to run
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, tons of people run around the Brentwood
Speaker 1: Country Club on that narrow dirt track. And there's one
Speaker 1: thing that always bothers me every time I run that route.
Speaker 1: Why do all the runners of West Los Angeles have
Speaker 1: to squeeze into this narrow, rocky little track when there's
Speaker 1: a huge, magnificent park just on the other side of
Speaker 1: the fence. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, and you're listening
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This episode is about the problem with golf. I hate
Speaker 1: golf and hopefully by the end of this you'll hate
Speaker 1: golf too. I'm standing who would die day Zac, who
Speaker 1: is a very successful landscape architect, Santa Monica, And we're
Speaker 1: on the corner of seventh Sente and Berlin Game and
Speaker 1: we're looking into the Brentwood Country Club and the first
Speaker 1: thing I see is barbed wire. Looks like a couple
Speaker 1: of layers of barbed wire. This looks like it looks
Speaker 1: like the Berlin Wall. I don't think they want us
Speaker 1: to get in there. What are you? What are we seeing?
Speaker 1: We're seeing this move a little closer here. What's that
Speaker 1: stand up trees? Do you know what those are? That
Speaker 1: looks like silkoakes in the foreground? And then I see
Speaker 1: a Sadrus deodora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees, which
Speaker 1: are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little open space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some Pinus canariensis. Looks like a redwood in there.
Speaker 1: I don't think dai Zak has ever played a round
Speaker 1: of golf in her life. That's exactly why I wanted
Speaker 1: her opinion. I wanted someone objective to tell me what
Speaker 1: it would take to turn this place into a park. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I would get rid of the two
Speaker 1: layers of bar lare the whole Eastern European feel East
Speaker 1: German field would have to be corrected. I mean, that
Speaker 1: might be some people's bag, but it's not very welcoming. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The typical golf course is two hundred acres, give or take.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of land. You have to landscape. Bit
Speaker 1: mow it drenched in pesticides, keep the sand traps perfect.
Speaker 1: I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds
Speaker 1: its bunkers, it typically takes about three hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: nine truckloads of sand three hundred and eighty nine just
Speaker 1: to keep everything nice and white and fluffy. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, because golf involves launching a potentially lethal
Speaker 1: projectile at great speeds across enormous distances, you have to
Speaker 1: severely limit the number of people on the course at
Speaker 1: any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle
Speaker 1: no more than seventy two golfers at once. So that's
Speaker 1: one golfer per one hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty three square feet. Can you imagine if basketball
Speaker 1: had the same population density as golf. I did the math.
Speaker 1: If basketball was played according to the geographical requirements of golf,
Speaker 1: a basketball court would be thirty acres. Picture that that
Speaker 1: had to play on motorcycles. Okay, another fact about golf.
Speaker 1: Rich people really really like it. They're obsessed with it
Speaker 1: in a way that there just isn't any parallel for
Speaker 1: ordinary people. Because serious golfers are super anal about their scores.
Speaker 1: We can actually quantify their obsession in order to calculate
Speaker 1: their handicap, basically how well they're playing relative to other
Speaker 1: people at the country club. They all post their results
Speaker 1: on a database maintained by the United States Golf Association,
Speaker 1: So we have a record, and it's a gold mine
Speaker 1: to be able to calculate your handicap and track it
Speaker 1: through time. You will log into the system either at
Speaker 1: your course or on your home computer. I'm talking to
Speaker 1: an economist at Miami University named Lee Biggerstaff. He's interested
Speaker 1: in the habits of top corporate executives. If you have
Speaker 1: the corner office and a multimillion dollars stock option and
Speaker 1: a golf stream five, does that make you more or
Speaker 1: less likely to put in a hard day's work. The
Speaker 1: USGA database is of serious professional interest to a guy
Speaker 1: like Biggerstaff. And you input are you played, and what
Speaker 1: day you played on, and what your score was, and
Speaker 1: you know, after a certain number of rounds being played,
Speaker 1: the USGA will will indicate what your handicap is, your
Speaker 1: level of skill, which allows you to compete against other
Speaker 1: golfers of different skill level and kind of normalize against
Speaker 1: that you know how you always hear that CEOs play
Speaker 1: a lot of golf. Bigger Staff's insight is that the
Speaker 1: USGA database allows us to know exactly how much they play.
Speaker 1: All you need to do is cross reference that list
Speaker 1: of scores with a list of the CEOs of America's
Speaker 1: largest companies. So that's what he does. It takes forever,
Speaker 1: by the way, we started while as a PhD student,
Speaker 1: and so the certainly was a multi month process. So
Speaker 1: it's not something that necessarily want to repeat in the
Speaker 1: near term just because it took a lot of collection time. There,
Speaker 1: how can you not love this? Surely this is why
Speaker 1: God invented graduate students. Bigger Staff begins with the names
Speaker 1: of the heads the top fifteen hundred publicly held companies
Speaker 1: in the US. Three hundred and sixty three of those
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred turn out to be so obsessed with golf
Speaker 1: that they enter their scores into the USGA database. What
Speaker 1: you're seeing on average is I think fifteen rounds a year.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the average CEO is playing that amount
Speaker 1: of golf, but it's a heavily skewed distribution, right, So
Speaker 1: we have a lot of people that are playing very
Speaker 1: little golf, and then we have a tail where we're
Speaker 1: picking it up. You know, the top quartile of what
Speaker 1: we're looking at, which is twenty two or more rounds
Speaker 1: per year. And if you go to the top ten
Speaker 1: percent of Bigger Staff sample, the CEOs are playing around
Speaker 1: at least thirty seven times a year. A round of
Speaker 1: golf is a good four four and a half hours,
Speaker 1: So if you play thirty seven times a year, that's
Speaker 1: more than one hundred and sixty hours on the course,
Speaker 1: the equivalent of five and a half weeks of work.
Speaker 1: By the way, these are understatements. They don't include the
Speaker 1: time spent driving to the course, warming up, getting changed,
Speaker 1: having a drink. Doesn't include the hours spent practicing shots
Speaker 1: on the putting green or the driving range, or all
Speaker 1: the rounds you that you don't enter into the database,
Speaker 1: like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a
Speaker 1: fun round, so the real time is probably way higher.
Speaker 1: Bigger Staff then goes on to show that the more
Speaker 1: golf of CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and
Speaker 1: also that the more golf of CEO plays, the more
Speaker 1: likely he is to be fired. In other words, this
Speaker 1: isn't a harmless habit. It's a dangerous habit. Remember the
Speaker 1: Wall Street investment bank bear Sterns. They went bankrupt during
Speaker 1: the mortgage crisis in July of two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: Right when the crisis was beginning. The CEO of bear
Speaker 1: Stearns would often helicopter out from Wall Street on Friday
Speaker 1: afternoons to his exclusive course in New Jersey to get
Speaker 1: a round in before sunset. Even when his company was collapsing,
Speaker 1: he couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's
Speaker 1: first four months in office, he visited his own golf
Speaker 1: courses twenty five times. One week he played three times.
Speaker 1: You would think he would be at the office learning
Speaker 1: how to be president, reading intelligence briefings, drading the swamp. No,
Speaker 1: he's golfing. It's an addiction, right, because the definition of
Speaker 1: an addiction is a self destructive habit. Just think if
Speaker 1: I said to you that an important employee of a
Speaker 1: major organization made lifestyle choices that caused him to miss
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of work, harm his performance, and put his
Speaker 1: own career in jeopardy, you would say, WHOA check that
Speaker 1: guy into rehab. That's golf crack cocaine for rich white
Speaker 1: guys the highest and the sample one hundred forty six
Speaker 1: or one hundred forty eight rounds recorded in a single year,
Speaker 1: which I mean at that point, that's a tremendous amount
Speaker 1: of time it's been on a golf course. You thought
Speaker 1: I was engaging in hyperboly, didn't you that I was
Speaker 1: using the word addiction metaphorically. One hundred and forty eight
Speaker 1: rounds a year is a round of golf every three days,
Speaker 1: and that would be if it was kind of uniformly
Speaker 1: distributed across the year. It's you know, golf certainly has
Speaker 1: a season where it's a little bit more sense in
Speaker 1: terms of the summer versus the winner. And you can't
Speaker 1: tell me what company is. I want to know what
Speaker 1: company is. Yeah, this we're just with this data, given
Speaker 1: it somewhat sensitive, we're unwilling to name out CEOs. I
Speaker 1: can't believe you won't tell me. I mean, here, we
Speaker 1: have an activity that is incredibly expensive, that is organized
Speaker 1: in just about the most extravagant manner possible. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, this expensive habit is incredibly addictive, to
Speaker 1: the point that there's a chief executive out there of
Speaker 1: a major American corporation who plays an average of one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty eight rounds of golf a year and
Speaker 1: is so completely unself conscious about that fact that he
Speaker 1: posts all one hundred and forty eight rounds on a
Speaker 1: public database where it can be analyzed by graduate students.
Speaker 1: So what happens to rich white guys with a dangerous,
Speaker 1: costly obsession. Do they burn through their life savings paying
Speaker 1: for their addiction like ordinary addicts do? Please give them
Speaker 1: a little more respect. By the way, this is my
Speaker 1: fifteenth year in television. Imagine that fifteen years of me
Speaker 1: the longest stomach test in the history of show. You
Speaker 1: could argue, I would say in the forties and fifties
Speaker 1: there was no one who was more widely popular in
Speaker 1: American than Bob Hope. I'm talking to Richard Zoglin, Bob
Speaker 1: Hope's biographer. I think Bob Hope has been a little
Speaker 1: forgotten in recent years, but in his day he was huge.
Speaker 1: Every late night comedian who does a stand up monologue
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the show owes a debt to
Speaker 1: Bob Hope because he kind of invented that thing, a
Speaker 1: stand up comedy monologue that sort of took note of
Speaker 1: what was going on in the world, what was going
Speaker 1: on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, and he
Speaker 1: was just the voice of America. I think for a
Speaker 1: long time. Bob Hope is a crucial part of the
Speaker 1: story of golf in America, although I'm warning you things
Speaker 1: are going to get a little complicated, which is sort
Speaker 1: of the point, because you don't get to run the
Speaker 1: world for as long as rich white guys have without
Speaker 1: being pretty wily, and some of their best and wiliest
Speaker 1: work has been on the golf course. So there's a
Speaker 1: principle in property tax law called highest and best use,
Speaker 1: which is that one of the ways you figure out
Speaker 1: how much to tax a piece of property is to
Speaker 1: estimate what its best use might be. For example, if
Speaker 1: I have a one acre plot and the fanciest part
Speaker 1: of Manhattan that I used to grow vegetables, I can't
Speaker 1: say to the city that land is worthless, it's just
Speaker 1: a vegetable garden. No, the city's going to say, we're
Speaker 1: going to value that one acre and tax it as
Speaker 1: if it had an apartment block on it, because that's
Speaker 1: the best use of land in the fancy parts of Manhattan. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've got a vast golf course in the middle
Speaker 1: of Beverly Hills or Brentwood Highest and best use makes
Speaker 1: you really nervous because plainly, the highest and best use
Speaker 1: of land in the middle of one of the most
Speaker 1: expensive and densely populated cities in the world is not
Speaker 1: a private golf course. So years ago, in nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: California's country clubs realize they have to act or they're
Speaker 1: going to get taxed into oblivion. They get together and
Speaker 1: they propose an amendment to the state constitution that permanently
Speaker 1: exempts them from the highest and best use standard. They
Speaker 1: want their vegetable garden to be taxed as a vegetable garden.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private
Speaker 1: golf courses are these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds, and membership
Speaker 1: is often restricted. In Los Angeles in nineteen sixty, a
Speaker 1: lot of these clubs didn't let in Jews. They certainly
Speaker 1: didn't let in black people except to work in the kitchen.
Speaker 1: Yet they wanted a constitutional exemption to ordinary property taxes
Speaker 1: like they were some kind of public amenity. How can
Speaker 1: they argue this, They don't, not really. They just bring
Speaker 1: him Bob Hope who, in addition to being the most
Speaker 1: popular entertainer in America, is also an obsessive golfer. Obsessive
Speaker 1: I might as well level with you. I spent so
Speaker 1: much time in Santraff they sent me citizenship papers from
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I love to hear the whole.
Speaker 1: Bob Hope once wrote an entire book just devoted to
Speaker 1: his golf game, called Confessions of a Hooker, in which
Speaker 1: he estimates that he had played on two thousand different
Speaker 1: golf courses over the course of his life. He belonged
Speaker 1: to the Lakeside Country Club in La near where he
Speaker 1: lived A little of the pious, Yes, I think so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The genius at picking Bob Hope is the face of
Speaker 1: California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act,
Speaker 1: was about being everyman. He's self deprecating. Half his jokes
Speaker 1: are about how he's not part of the in group,
Speaker 1: even though of course there's no one more in than
Speaker 1: Bob Hope. Isn't this wonderful all being here in California?
Speaker 1: I just love it. Look at that sky. That's the
Speaker 1: only place in the world where you can get four
Speaker 1: seasons in one day. I want to tell you that
Speaker 1: this is the vie. We're better. Hurry, we'll be It'll
Speaker 1: be snowing before the third hole. Yeah, let's move on.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, So, how did the Bob Hope for Golf
Speaker 1: campaign do? In nineteen sixty It wins, The proposition passes,
Speaker 1: and it's added to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,
Speaker 1: where it remains to this day. In order to win
Speaker 1: a set of privileges for the very wealthy. In other words,
Speaker 1: California's country clubs turned to a man who symbolizes the
Speaker 1: common man. I mean, when does it ever happen that
Speaker 1: a TV celebrity wins a sweetheart deal for his rich
Speaker 1: golf buddies by posing as a friend of the common man.
Speaker 1: If you get my drift to give me back, just
Speaker 1: should like totally understand Prop thirteen properties past in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, and what are the principal stipulations of the proposition.
Speaker 1: I'm in a big conference room in the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: County Municipal Building, one of those beautiful nineteen thirties office
Speaker 1: buildings that are all over downtown Las Ange Angelists. There
Speaker 1: are four people on the other side of the table.
Speaker 1: They're from the La County Tax Assessor's office. I'm on
Speaker 1: my quest to figure out why Brentwood Country Club isn't
Speaker 1: just a big park that I can go running through,
Speaker 1: and I've decided to start with the people who run
Speaker 1: the tax system. These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They
Speaker 1: have promised to help me. You'll have to guess what
Speaker 1: they really think. The tax rate is set is one
Speaker 1: percent of the value, as opposed to a variable rate,
Speaker 1: which it was before. Demand speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's
Speaker 1: talking about the most famous amendment to the California Constitution,
Speaker 1: Proposition thirteen. The properties only get reassessed with when there's
Speaker 1: a transfer or a change of ownership, or there's new construction.
Speaker 1: Those are the primary parts of it. Here's what he's saying.
Speaker 1: If you own a house, every one or two years,
Speaker 1: typically the value of your property is reassessed by the
Speaker 1: city or county where you live. So if your house
Speaker 1: doubles in value, the local government will raise your taxes accordingly.
Speaker 1: That's the way property taxes work, except in California. Proposition
Speaker 1: thirteen said that for tax purposes, the value of any
Speaker 1: piece of property in California is frozen at pre nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight levels, and the only way that property can
Speaker 1: be reassessed at its real current value is if the
Speaker 1: property is sold, or, to be more specific, if ownership
Speaker 1: of more than fifty percent of the property changes hands.
Speaker 1: In other words, California has two kinds of taxpayers, the
Speaker 1: post nineteen seventy eight people who pay normal property taxes,
Speaker 1: and the people lucky and old enough to be living
Speaker 1: in the same house they owned in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: who pay a tiny fraction of their fair share. You know,
Speaker 1: I've got family members who owned their houses nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: and they're paying I think their TAXI values about ninety
Speaker 1: thousand dollars or something like that. The houses in that
Speaker 1: neighborhood sel for six hundred, so it's so they're paying
Speaker 1: a lot less than It's the proper teen conundrum, which
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've read about. Please understand this system is insane,
Speaker 1: totally crazy. I mean, just think of all the reasons
Speaker 1: why someone might deserve a big tax break. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're sick, they're poor, they have tons of young kids,
Speaker 1: they've made a big investment in their business. The State
Speaker 1: of California says no, we think the most deserving group
Speaker 1: are people whose property hasn't changed hands in forty years. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: imagine that you're a private golf club. You did that
Speaker 1: spectacular bit of jiu jitsu with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: which means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift
Speaker 1: from God number one. Then comes proposition thirteen, and you
Speaker 1: get a second gift from God because proposition thirteen says
Speaker 1: that those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen
Speaker 1: forever at nineteen seventy eight levels, so long as your
Speaker 1: country club does not change hands. And that last part
Speaker 1: is crucial, because if you have a change in ownership,
Speaker 1: then you have to pay real property tax like every
Speaker 1: other long suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one
Speaker 1: place since nineteen seventy eight. So the country clubs of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles all hang by a thread. They continue to
Speaker 1: exist only so long as the tax system perceives that
Speaker 1: they have not changed hands, and for years everyone assumes
Speaker 1: they haven't changed hands. I mean Brettwood, LA country Club, Wilshire.
Speaker 1: All the major golf clubs were all founded before nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, but Then a neighborhood newspaper called the Los
Speaker 1: Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article January sixteenth, twenty ten,
Speaker 1: in which they say, wait a minute, most private country
Speaker 1: clubs in Los Angeles have what's called equity ownership. They're
Speaker 1: owned by their members. When you admitted, you get a share.
Speaker 1: When you die or quit, someone else takes your share.
Speaker 1: So over time, if enough members die or quit, isn't
Speaker 1: that a change in ownership. That question was put to
Speaker 1: Rick Auerback, who was then the head of tax assessment
Speaker 1: for Ella County. I think the quote was kind of
Speaker 1: funny for him. You said something about, let's see on
Speaker 1: most issues we haven't heard at least the question asked
Speaker 1: before he said, Who'd worked in the office thirty nine years,
Speaker 1: But this was a new one. So Auerback refers the
Speaker 1: question to the city's lawyers. They put their best and
Speaker 1: brightest legal minds on it for six months, and on
Speaker 1: June second, twenty ten, the county's tax court issues a solemn,
Speaker 1: four page ruling. They conclude, no country clubs haven't changed hands.
Speaker 1: If you're keeping track, that's the third straight up gift
Speaker 1: from God that Ellie's private country clubs have gotten in
Speaker 1: the last fifty years. I was talking to someone who's
Speaker 1: a member of Feller Country Club, okay, and I said,
Speaker 1: what percentage of the members of bel Air today? We're
Speaker 1: members in seventy eight and he said, you know, ten percent?
Speaker 1: So why isn't that a change of ownership? Right? If
Speaker 1: I haven't had a chance to dig through this a
Speaker 1: whole lot since I got it out of the file
Speaker 1: the other day. But they kind of get into it.
Speaker 1: It's they're saying, if there's no one event that is
Speaker 1: that is more than fifty percent of a transfer, then
Speaker 1: it's not. Each of those little individual slices are not
Speaker 1: a change of ownership on their own. Did you find
Speaker 1: that argument plausible? Well, it's prop Yeah, that's that's were
Speaker 1: implementers of the law. You don't have opinions. No, Well,
Speaker 1: I could swear as I looked across the table at
Speaker 1: Donnelly and his cohorts that they were twitching like they
Speaker 1: desperately wanted to say something but had to bite their tongue.
Speaker 1: You know what it's like. You know that famous paradox
Speaker 1: I forgot with the ship. Well, you the question is
Speaker 1: if you change, If you have a ship and you change,
Speaker 1: it's like some ancient greeking, and you change one board
Speaker 1: at a time, is at the end of the day
Speaker 1: as a ship different. That's what this is. The thing
Speaker 1: I can't remember is a ship of theseus. The famous
Speaker 1: thought experiment described by the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. Plutarch says, imagine theseus is sailing on
Speaker 1: a ship, and one by one he replaces every one
Speaker 1: of the original planks that make up that ship with
Speaker 1: a new plank, until every single piece of the ship
Speaker 1: is new. The question is, when Theseus reaches shore, is
Speaker 1: he sailing on the same ship as he was when
Speaker 1: he left or a new ship. One view says it's
Speaker 1: a new ship. This is called the meriological theory of identity.
Speaker 1: The identity of something is the sum of its component parts.
Speaker 1: Change the parts, you change the thing. On the other
Speaker 1: side of the argument is something called spatio temporal continuity theory,
Speaker 1: which says that an object can maintain its identity so
Speaker 1: long as the change is gradual and the form or
Speaker 1: shape of the object is preserved to the changes of
Speaker 1: its component materials. I think you can see where I'm
Speaker 1: going with this. The city's lawyers take the second view,
Speaker 1: so long as a country club replaces its rich white
Speaker 1: guys gradually, and so long as each new rich white
Speaker 1: guy preserves the form and shape of the rich white
Speaker 1: guy he is replacing, then the private golf clubs of
Speaker 1: today must have the same existential status as the private
Speaker 1: golf courses of nineteen seventy eight. Collections of rich white guys,
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of the La County property tax system,
Speaker 1: possess spatio temporal continuity. At this point I realized I
Speaker 1: was in way over my head. Tax assessors were not
Speaker 1: going to be enough. I needed an actual philosopher, so
Speaker 1: I called Mark Cohen of the University of Washington to
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of the question of whether large
Speaker 1: groups of rich white people possess on too logical permanence.
Speaker 1: Here's an argument that favors the space EO temporal continuity theory.
Speaker 1: The idea that what makes the ship persists through time
Speaker 1: as one and the same is that it moves smoothly
Speaker 1: through space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard,
Speaker 1: and a replacement plank is installed taken from the cargo
Speaker 1: the ship has on board, so when it arrives it
Speaker 1: doesn't have a single part that is identical to any
Speaker 1: of the parts it started out with, and so there's
Speaker 1: no point at which you can say, aha, now we
Speaker 1: have a new ship, a different a numerically different ship.
Speaker 1: So that if you have that sort of argument in mind,
Speaker 1: you think, okay, the Space Show temporal continuity criterion is
Speaker 1: the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts
Speaker 1: are the same. But Cone is not finished as a philosopher.
Speaker 1: His job is to consider all the scenarios raised by
Speaker 1: the ship of theseus conundrum, like the museum count example.
Speaker 1: The museum example goes like this. Suppose the ship is
Speaker 1: in a museum of ancient ships and a gang of
Speaker 1: crooks is trying to steal this ancient ship, and it
Speaker 1: realizes it can't just haul it out in one piece.
Speaker 1: They would easily be spotted. So they come up with
Speaker 1: a clever scheme. They sneak in every night and steal
Speaker 1: the ship, one board at a time, one plank a day,
Speaker 1: so the museum doesn't realize what's going on. By the
Speaker 1: time they're finished one day number n they have all
Speaker 1: end parts of the ship removed. Now they reassemble them
Speaker 1: and put it on the black market. They're selling Theseus's
Speaker 1: ancient ship for a pretty price, and they've left a
Speaker 1: replica behind in the museum. I contend that in this case,
Speaker 1: when you describe it in this way, it seems as
Speaker 1: if Theseus's ship has been stolen piecemeal from the museum.
Speaker 1: Cohen's point is that there's no sim will answer to
Speaker 1: the ship of Theseus problem. You can go around and
Speaker 1: around and around. That's why it's a puzzle. But do
Speaker 1: you see what the lawyers at the LA Board of
Speaker 1: Equalization did. They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that
Speaker 1: has bedeviled some of the best minds in the world
Speaker 1: for two thousand years and declare victory and say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's definitely option one spatio temporal continuity. The problem as
Speaker 1: it stands is irresolvable, and you only come to a
Speaker 1: conclusion that makes any sense to you if you place
Speaker 1: it in a context in which there is something sort
Speaker 1: of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps that tilts you
Speaker 1: in one direction or the other. So what's the pragmatic,
Speaker 1: extra metaphysical consideration here? It's at Los Angeles ranks near
Speaker 1: the bottom of all major metropolitan areas in the United States.
Speaker 1: In terms of public parks, there's Griffith Park off in
Speaker 1: the northeastern corner of the city, which only a fraction
Speaker 1: of the city can even get to. And then there's
Speaker 1: basically nothing except these massive golf courses which are both
Speaker 1: closed to general public and subsidized by the general public.
Speaker 1: Do you want to know the size of that subsidy?
Speaker 1: I asked around a guy I know knows a guy
Speaker 1: who's a member of the La Country Club. That guy's
Speaker 1: back of the envelope calculation was that the club's land
Speaker 1: was worth about six billion dollars. But that was a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. Then I heard from another guy
Speaker 1: who said that they now think it's worth nine billion,
Speaker 1: nine billion. Under normal circumstances, the property taxes on that
Speaker 1: much land would come to about ninety million dollars a year.
Speaker 1: Do you know what LA Country Club actually paid after
Speaker 1: you add up the Bob Hope exemption and the spatio
Speaker 1: temporal continuity ruling two hundred thousand dollars give or take all. Right,
Speaker 1: let's do the math together. They should be paying ninety million.
Speaker 1: In fact, they're only paying two hundred thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: property taxes. Ninety millions two hundred thousand dollars is eighty
Speaker 1: nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars. That's how much the
Speaker 1: tax bearers of Los Angeles subsidize one of the swankiest
Speaker 1: country clubs in the world every year. Well, now I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring up something else that comes to mind here,
Speaker 1: which is that the spatial temporal argument, taken out of
Speaker 1: philosophical context strikes me as being can sometimes be really troubling.
Speaker 1: For example, it's a very I mean, I think there's
Speaker 1: something fundamentally intuitive about it. And I don't mean that
Speaker 1: necessarily in a good way. That it you know that
Speaker 1: we get the fact that we call the Hudson River
Speaker 1: the Hudson River, even though the Hudson River is at
Speaker 1: every second changing. It's like, you know, the water's up,
Speaker 1: the same boats go down on it. You know, it's
Speaker 1: never that he never looks the same way twice ever,
Speaker 1: But we continue to call it the Hudson River. But
Speaker 1: it strikes me that in a political context, as kind
Speaker 1: of thinking can be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice. Interesting,
Speaker 1: for example, what is the what is an aristocracy but
Speaker 1: a political formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle. Right,
Speaker 1: it is something like that, and it's it's troubling it
Speaker 1: precisely that way, because they're saying circumstances can change, and
Speaker 1: the holders of the privilege can change. The father can
Speaker 1: die and the son can inherit the peerage, but the
Speaker 1: peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's independent of
Speaker 1: all that's going around it. And that's yes. Where where
Speaker 1: the identity of the object confers, for example, a right
Speaker 1: or a title, and if it's considered to be held
Speaker 1: intact and in full by whoever holds it at any
Speaker 1: one time, then basically that removes change altogether from the
Speaker 1: realm of what matters as far as ownership is concerned. Yes,
Speaker 1: so the seventeenth great grandson of the peer still has
Speaker 1: all of the rights and privileges, even though so far
Speaker 1: removed from the rights and privileges as they attached to
Speaker 1: the original holder of them. So there is there is
Speaker 1: something that is unfair and anti egalitarian about the way
Speaker 1: this principle can get applied. So the golf clubs of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions exactly. I think someone
Speaker 1: needs to tell Bromwood in La Country Club and all
Speaker 1: the others that if they want to hold space she
Speaker 1: owed temporal continuity privileges, they have to give something back.
Speaker 1: Take down your barbed wire. Your members can play golf
Speaker 1: on weekdays, but evenings and weekends belong to the ordinary
Speaker 1: taxpayers of Los Angeles. Let them come and enjoy the
Speaker 1: greens and fairways that they've been subsidizing for generations. It's
Speaker 1: worth remembering, by the way, that the most famous golf
Speaker 1: course in the world, the home of golf, Saint Andrews
Speaker 1: in Scotland, is open to the general public on Sundays.
Speaker 1: In Toronto, the fanciest golf club is Rosedale Country Club,
Speaker 1: right in the middle of the city, but the golf
Speaker 1: course is only private in summer. The rest of the
Speaker 1: time it's open to anyone who wants to go for
Speaker 1: a walk, or play frisbee, or go cross country skiing.
Speaker 1: Canada and the United Kingdom, i would point out, are
Speaker 1: governed by a queen. They have an actual aristocracy, but
Speaker 1: somehow they've figured out a way to have their fancy
Speaker 1: golf courses be democratic. It's only on the corner of
Speaker 1: sen the sen day in burling game that golf remains
Speaker 1: an instrument of medieval privilege. I mean when you fly
Speaker 1: over LA, the green space that you see is cemeteries
Speaker 1: and golf courses and golf courses. You don't see parks.
Speaker 1: We don't have a park like say San Francisco's Golden
Speaker 1: Gate Park or New York's Central Parks Central Park. Guys,
Speaker 1: Doc and I are standing outside the barbed wire or
Speaker 1: Brownwood Country Club, peering through a fence. We're trying to
Speaker 1: spot one of the privileged few permitted a walk in
Speaker 1: the park on the west side of LA. I see one, guy,
Speaker 1: I see one. That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun
Speaker 1: is now coming out, like right now. We're standing on
Speaker 1: the running track and there's someone running up right now.
Speaker 1: There are more people on this narrow dirt track than
Speaker 1: there are typically on the golf course. Let see if
Speaker 1: you can still see any kind of I'm still looking
Speaker 1: for a golf off. I'm not I see one. You
Speaker 1: see one? Yeah, that's very exciting. Yeah, next time I'm
Speaker 1: climbing defense, maybe we all should. Origion's History is produced
Speaker 1: by Meila Bell and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
Speaker 1: and Clmr Martinez, wife our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Andy Bowers and my old pal Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: At Panoply, I'm Malcolm Bradwell.