The 99PI Anniversary Special: 15 for 15

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So here's the thing. This year marks the 15th anniversary of 99 % Invisible, which is honestly kind of hard to believe. If 99 % Invisible were a person, it would be old enough to have a provisional driver's license in some states or celebrate a quinceañera. That's kind of all you can do at age 15 in this country. But still, the first episode of 99 % Invisible was released on September 3rd, 2010. And since then, we've had 15 years of stories about design, architecture, and the choices we make that shape our world. 15 years of taking the time to stop and read the plaque.

0:4415 years of you, our listeners, sending us the most incredible observations about the built environment that we never would have noticed on our own. To mark this milestone, we thought we'd do something a little different. Instead of our usual deep dive into one particular design story, I'm going to answer 15 questions submitted by our listeners and the staff about the show, about the field of design, and about me. And to help me navigate this whole thing, I'm joined by 99PI producer Vivian Lay, who will be moderating the questions. Hi, Roman. Happy birthday. Thank you so much. I'm a little nervous, but I think we'll get through this together.

1:26Yeah, yeah. I mean, granting me the power to choose these questions was a very bold move on your part. So we'll see how this goes. We got a lot of fun questions. Some of them were submitted through email. Some came through social media, our Discord server. Oh, nice. And a bunch of them I just made up because I thought it'd be really funny for you to answer on mic. So yeah, I'm ready to jump in if you are. I am ready. Let's go for it. Okay, great. So the first question came from Taylor from New Jersey. Shout out to New Jersey, my second favorite state. But Taylor actually has kind of a doozy of a question for you.

2:04They ask, a city hires you to make their residents' lives 10 % better without spending any money. You could only rearrange, remove, or repurpose things that already exist. What do you do? Without spending any money? No, no. And you can't you can't create anything. It's basically just redoing what already exists. OK, so I I have one idea. I don't know if it completely fulfills the idea of no money, but if it if rearranging, removing, repurposing works, I feel like all those things involve like a little bit of money, honestly. But like, I think that I think the best way to make a city better would be dedicated rapid bus lanes, which I think if you have the buses and you have the lanes and you just need to paint them and like, you know, mark them.

2:54I think it kind of fulfills the mandate of the question, but that would be like regular. Take every bus you have, school buses, public transit buses, and just have a lane, have them run every 10 minutes between places that are important. You will make a city tremendously better. I don't know if it's really free, but I also like not to quibble with Taylor, just in general, the whole concept of like fixing stuff without money is like a thing that I find is like a weird political thing that people talk about that is like, no, we actually throw money at things that we value and that's OK. But I would throw a little bit of money at this.

3:31I think it's much cheaper than light rail and various other solutions. It really is a rearrangement of resources and the emphasis on making a city a better place. But rapid, very frequent bus routes between places would be huge. Dedicated bus lanes. That means like they run smoothly because there's no other cars in the lane. I think that's how I'd make a city better. Almost any city would be made better by that. Yeah, it's pretty good. So the next question is actually a voice message. So I'm going to play it for you. Hey, this is Taya from Seattle, and I'm really excited to congratulate the entire team at 99 % Invisible.

4:06And thank you for being such an awesome part of my life for the past 15 years. And I'm just asking for 15 more. My question is for Roman. I'm wondering, in the time that you've been doing this, has your definition of design changed at all? And if so, how? Thanks. um i always interpreted it pretty broadly when even when the show started but i think in the beginning when you're trying to you know like when you're trying to sort of present a thesis to an audience you keep it a little bit tighter with like buildings and cities and product design and flags and you know things with you know visual design and i always knew that i thought of design quite broadly.

4:55And the reason why I chose the name 99 % Invisible and not Blank Design or The Design of Things or whatever was because I thought that that name was so evocative and open-ended to the idea of what we could include in it in terms of design. So I always thought of it pretty broadly. It has gotten more broad over time. Like when I think about like there's i mean i never would have conceived of the quiet storm episode of christopher's like in 99 invisible but i love it and i think that's that's one of the things that's that's the the way that my definition of design has evolved is that as the show opened up and had more people in it and more brains on it it it is evolved because of their interests and then i'm such a fan of our staff that I just, I like to follow them wherever they go.

5:50And it comes to this as a sort of the mandate of design. And that is necessarily broadened it because there's just more minds on the show than there was before. So in that way, it's evolved. Yeah. Okay. So next question. This one came from our Discord and it was from someone with the name YFNH. Catchy. So they are asking, barring the noble funicular, what's the one designed object that's fallen out of common use that you think deserves another chance? I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, and this is not a strongly held belief, but I think cash. Like money? Like paper money? Yeah, like paper money.

6:35I know that I like all the tools of tapping and, you know, Venmo and various things and I get it. But I feel like we are going down a path of having our economy locked up by apps and things and the messiness of the economy and looseness of giving change and giving tips and paying for cash and not being banked. And, you know, I think that there's something that we will lose and it has potentially like big downsides down the line. I think that there's kind of an inherent classism in the loss of cash. I think that there's a lot of control there that I'm feeling queasy about when I go to a place that says they don't accept any cash.

7:30It's not a strongly held belief. And I love all the conveniences. I'm not saying that those things are bad. I'm just saying that I think there's a cost. I think there's a societal cost at risk when we lose cash completely. I think that's actually a really great answer. Okay, thanks. It's a great answer because I feel like every country too, when they print their own banknotes, it's something like a little piece of artwork. Oh, that's another part of it that I wasn't thinking about. But like, totally. I think that like as much as I think our paper money is so boring and so awful. Like, that's the part I don't love.

8:04Like, I wish it would we would expand it to have like leaders in science and art and poets and stuff on our money the way every other country in the world does and better colors and everything. You know, as a representation of kind of a civic pride, that's another huge loss. Totally a huge loss. But yeah, all around cash, like I feel like there's great opportunity there to, you know, to represent our best selves. And I also just think that the openness of cash as a system is super important and it'll be a shame if it goes away completely. So our next question came from someone named Connor Hibbs.

8:43He submitted this through email. He actually submitted two questions and cheated. I'm going to ask one of these questions. Run a tight ship here. I'm sorry, Connor. So what is something you come across in your everyday life that intrigues you, but you haven't created a story about? Oh, I've had this longstanding desire to do a story about the Brannock device. Do you know what the Brannock device is? No, tell me more. Okay. The Brannock device is that metal foot measuring tool that is in shoe stores. I've always kind of loved them. I don't go to shoe stores much anymore, but as a kid, like they're fun to play with.

9:27They're like heavy and they're fun to put your foot in. And they're kind of, they have an ASMR quality to them. Like you mess with them and you're measuring something. And I researched them once because I thought like, everyone loves this thing this is the greatest thing and i've found that the branick company of syracuse new york that's the only thing they've made like and i think they've they've i don't even know maybe a hundred years i have no idea i can't remember the research i did on it but but they've made one one thing and that is that thing they've made that metal thing in different colors i think recently but it's they make this one thing it's called the branick device It's named after the founder of the company.

10:05And I'm just kind of fascinated by it. For sure. And it is, I never really thought about it. It's in every single Payless, every single shoe store. And it's, they're solving a problem that you could solve with a ruler, essentially. Something that you probably already have. It does width and height of the shoe and then translates it into shoe size and stuff. It's a pretty simple thing, but it's like the fact that it is so simple. And there's like these, you know, there's new ways to kind of do it. Like they have you stand on a digital thing and they do your measure your foot. I've never really done those before, but I just think that there's an elegance to it.

10:38There's like a weight to it and like a history to it that I just thought, oh, there's probably something cool here. I just don't I don't know what it is for sure. But and so in a way, I can't I could never like pitch it to the staff. I've told some some people about it, but like I feel like I'd have to just go there and see what the vibe of those folks was like and see what their deal was. One day. One day. One day. We'll listen together one day. Great. Okay. So our next question is another voice message. It's from another Connor. About a third of our listeners are named Connor. So here's Connor.

11:13Hey, Roman. This is Connor Harrington, a longtime listener, first time caller from lovely Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Now I'm a big fan of another pod that you made an excellent guest appearance on, Blank Check. So my question for you is, what would 99Pi's four favorites be if the pod had a Letterboxd account? Nice. Should you explain Letterboxd? Yes, absolutely. I'm not on Letterboxd, but I know it. So do you know what the question is asking you specifically? I do. You do. Okay. So for listeners who might not know, Letterboxd is like a social media platform, basically, where you'll post about movies that you watch.

11:49since you can make lists of things that you just watched. And basically it's a way for like movie buffs to find each other and talk about movies and that kind of thing. It's a way to turn an enjoyable thing into work as far as I'm concerned. Exactly, to gamify, yeah. Gamify something that should be relaxing. Exactly. But yeah, it's a really popular platform with movie buffs. And so there's something called the Letterboxd Four where you will basically post what are your top four movies. And that doesn't mean what do you think are the best movies? It's kind of what are your favorite movies? And it's become a little bit of like a Myers-Briggs personality test.

12:27So what you put in your Letterboxd for kind of defines a little bit your personality. So I think Connor here is asking, what are 99PI's Letterboxd for? It's hard for me to know like what 99PI's one is. I can kind of just do me, I guess. But maybe they'll give some window into 99PI. But I always say that my favorite movie, it's very basic. Jaws has been my favorite movie forever because I think it is the best buddy comedy. I think it's the best adventure movie. I think it's one of the best horror movies. And it's all rolled into one. And when you watch it over and over again, different parts of it are emphasized and you forget about little bits.

13:10I've seen it so many times and I'm like, I'm stunned by in the beginning, how much information is, is like conveyed about the island and the city as Brody is walking around and people are cross talking over each other. And I just love it. I love it. I really like my favorite movies are all kind of sprawling, you know, like with different sections that have different tones. Like I think another one is The Godfather. Again, it's so basic. Like I get it. Like it's not, it's not, I'm not trying to like, you know, you know, surprise you here necessarily. I'm a huge Coen Brothers guy. I think, I think again, like I know that, that I have a hard time separating best and, and favorite, but I think their best and my favorite is Fargo.

14:01Again, it balances tons of tones. I think it's super funny. I think it's super harrowing. And I think it tells you a lot about human nature and I can watch it again and again. The most recent movie that I would say the most 99 PI movie and the one that really like knocked me out recently is Perfect Days. I think that's... I haven't seen that one. Oh, it's so good. It's like Vim Benders, who's like a classic, like, you know, indie auteur type. But it's about a guy who is just making his way cleaning public toilets in Tokyo. and it's just it's just the greatest has great music it has a great vibe i think it could like if everyone watched it the the world would be a better place like it really teaches you about life and contentment and i just i think it's super beautiful i mean yeah cleaning toilets in tokyo set to nice music sounds like a 99pi episode it really of itself it feels like it like Like it has a kind of an underlying kind of spiritualism that I sometimes feel with 99PI, like specifically like we would never do something so on story like as that one.

15:11It's more of like a mood, but it it has just like appreciation of urban landscape, of ritual, of care. You know, it has that feeling that I think people people told me about the show. I don't know if I knew I was embedding it in the show in the very beginning, but this sort of sense that when you notice design details, you notice that you're being cared for by people. You notice that things are being made better for you. And this is a movie that's just about that, about somebody who's making the world better for other people and himself and finding great contentment in that and contentment in the world.

15:49And it's just lovely. You really should watch it. I think you would like it. And it has just the greatest soundtrack because he also like he buys cassette tapes, like use cassette tapes of like, of, you know, Velvet Underground and stuff like that. The music is, you know, is so good. So it's great. Okay. I promise I'm going to watch this one and I will post on our movie club Slack channel as soon as I watch this. Sounds good. Okay. So the next question came from somebody here on staff at 99PI who you will probably recognize. Hey, Roman. And this is Joe, you know me. Now that you're such an expert on con law, if you were allowed to make one serious change to the Constitution, what would it be?

16:31So that, of course, is our producer, Joe Rosenberg. I think you just have to eliminate the electoral college. I think that's it. I mean, I think that everything good follows from that. That sort of weird proportional weight and sort of the tyranny of the minority and all that sort of stuff just goes away. I'd much rather have the tyranny of the majority than the tyranny of the minority. And a lot of the horrible stuff unwinds when you have the popular election of the president. I think it's a huge thing. That's what I'd change first. Got it. So the next question is, what's a design-related hill you're willing to die on?

17:10I don't want to die on any hill, I don't think. I mean, mostly when it comes to certain design things or design movements, truly the answer is nothing. I can be convinced by a good story or a good reason for any ugly thing to exist or whatever if it's really thoughtful and done right. That was the whole premise of the show is that I wanted people, if they couldn't see the ugly building, because we were doing this on the radio or in podcasting, that they could learn to love it before they learned to hate it by seeing it. You know what I mean? Like, so that. But the one that's sticking with me, and this is going to be kind of abstract, and I don't know if this is going to come off well, is the idea of the march to make things more and more efficient makes the world a worse place.

18:01And I think that this in terms of advertising, like the idea that we were going to efficiently measure how effective advertising was through clicks and eyeballs and stuff erased all of the extra money that made all the journalism and all the pop culture that you cared about in the 20th century. It made it all possible. The inefficiency of the advertising system made everything good in this world. Like I think that the idea that you're trying to get things to be as efficient as possible is actually a terrible world-destroying idea. And all it does is like the most efficient restaurant is like a ghost kitchen that has no storefront because that's inefficient because it could be empty sometimes.

18:45And it's a ghost kitchen that just ships you a thing and has an underpaid delivery person and brings it to your door and you never leave. And this is stripping away all the goodness of the world and of cities. Like I think efficiency is absolute garbage. And that is the design-related hill I'm willing to die on. Like I feel like you should always be allowing for great deals of inefficiency to make a nice design city, a nice design system and make it work. I really hate the focus on efficiency. Not only does it destroy all these good things, it takes money and gives it to the worst people. Like the platform creators and the tech people instead of all the loose, like empty, like change and tips and things.

19:30And it's not like things are cheaper or things are better. They just money is being transferred to the wrong people instead of creators and people who make the world a better place through community and creation. Yeah. A more efficient world is a place where more people are left out, essentially. Like the more people are going to be more inefficient, the more people that are included. Yeah, totally. You need friction. You need the space of creation, that open freedom of an inefficient system where money sloshes around inside of it. Like these frictions and inefficiencies are what make everything good about the world.

20:06Yeah. So if you can handle that big abstraction, that is the design related hill I'm willing to die on. I mean, that's a great spicy hill to die on. So I want to hear nothing about how good efficiency is or the Department of Government Efficiency. Nonsense. That is the worst world that we're building when we do efficient things. Okay. Next question. So Gelsie Bennett on Instagram was wondering, when you were delivering pizzas in Memphis, what restaurant were you delivering for? Okay. So my cousin, my beloved cousin, Lynn Cruthers, who passed away several years ago, she was the manager, regional manager of seven locations of Papa John's throughout Memphis.

20:57And so when I was extremely broke, I left grad school. I was moving out to San Francisco to do something. I didn't know what was going to happen. I delivered pizzas in her restaurants. And I would say so. So I mostly worked out of the Bartlett location that's kind of outside of Memphis. The big store was the Midtown store. I worked there a little bit and lived in Midtown. So if you had Papa John's delivered to you in Midtown, but especially like Bartlett and Cordova, like kind of outside Memphis, like north of Memphis, you may have gotten a pizza from me. This would be in the mid-90s. You were a Papa John's guy then?

21:39I was a Papa John's guy. I mean, I was never a Papa John's guy, but that was the job that was offered to me. So in addition, if you grew up in Memphis in the 80s and 90s, I worked at a – my cousin Lynn owned a video store called Video Stop in Germantown, Tennessee. And you might have gotten movies rented by me. And this was when I was way underage. I worked there like all growing up. And then I worked at the Cecil's bagging groceries. So I worked a lot in Memphis during the summers and during breaks and stuff like that. At one point I was talking with Chuck Bryant of Stuff You Should Know, who grew up in Germantown, Tennessee, and was a huge movie fan and ended up moving out to Los Angeles to work in movies before he started his podcast career.

22:25And we determined that he very likely was a customer at the video store that I was a clerk at. Hilarious. So, side story, Jason DeLeon, who's one of the producers here at the show. but Jason used to do a lot of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and go to tournaments and he's gone to a few in Southern California and I at one point would be like a videographer for a jiu-jitsu competition. There's a chance that like I might have recorded Jason. Some type of Jason. Like in some kind of like hammer lock or something. That's awesome. I love it. Cool. Okay. So our next question came from our Discord again from a user named ASG1982.

23:101982. And they ask, what goes into making a 99PI episode? Obviously, there's research in a script, but what are the steps of how it happens and where do all the background people fit in? That's kind of a big question. Yeah. Coming from a background person. Well, that's funny because I've always thought, well, background person is not how I would phrase our staff. One of the things I love about the show is I think that people have gotten to know all the producers and their personalities through the show. I mean, definitely like I have a big imprint on the show, but I think a lot of people's taste and stuff comes out.

23:49But like, what's really interesting is how much everyone works on every show in some way. So the process of putting together an episode, I think is kind of around 16 weeks at this point. Like that's how we count on it. They sometimes come in faster, but we don't count on them being much quicker than that. And a person pitches a story, it gets greenlit, and then they go report it for a while, just like find out stuff, interview people. They get assigned an editor and that editor works with them to try to like realize the sort of the potential of both what they're finding and what people desired in the pitch.

24:30And then it comes into form as a script that those two people mostly work on together. And then that's the first time I see it at that point is when it's a script and we do what we call a read to tape, but I think most people might know it as like a table read, where essentially we just do it, we perform it live. And a bunch of people are in the room. I mean, this is all Zoom. It used to be in one room, but now it's all on Zoom. And people put notes like in a Google Doc all along as like we're performing it and playing the tape that's been cut. And they're probably like, I don't know when we're done, like hundreds, hundreds of notes.

25:10Yeah. Hundreds of comments. An overwhelming amount. In a way, it's like a pretty brutal process, but everyone is really kind. And everyone, I think, is like we're trying to get to the best thing. And I think that everyone has been trained to recognize that this is good. You know, like this is a good process. I've always liked our edits. I've been in other rooms or heard horror stories of other rooms about edits where people leave crying and stuff like that. That doesn't – I mean people can leave frustrated because there's a lot to do and stuff like that. But we don't have a culture of cutting each other down here.

25:48No, no, no. We do have some brutal shorthands for things over time. So all the notes that come in and sometimes they're like, oh, I like this person or this like this, or we should move this part to here or whatever. But we have some shorthands in the edit. So there's like somebody will put in C-W-G-H-F. Did I do that right? C-W-G-H-F, which is, can we get here faster? Yeah. Which is one of those ones where like, like. Yeah. And it comes up in every single script. It's like, when is it going to happen? So can we get here faster is one. Oh, Emmett's, I love this one. Relentlessly chronological is something that Emmett said once.

26:35Devastating. devastating content. And it has to do with like these histories. Sometimes we do these long histories and you just feel like you're plodding along. It just captured something that I felt for a long time, but never put words to it. But that sort of sense of just like, oh, but if I skip from 900 AD to 1800, I have to put these like three things in between. But like you feel that they're unnecessary. And sometimes we just free ourselves from this idea. It's just like instead of being relentlessly chronological. Just do the parts that are important and fun and forward the story and stop being so relentlessly chronological.

27:12Like sometimes the driving force of the action is time and sometimes it's the thesis of the collection of things so that you lead with that first. And so it's a matter of mixing things up so you don't feel like you're just reading a timeline of events. So relentlessly chronological is a dig that kills me. So yeah, so then there's like that big long paper edit with lots of notes. Then there's the producer incorporates those notes and creates an audio version of it. So like I'll get my script and I'll record my parts that record their parts and put it together. And that becomes what we call listen edit.

27:52And we listen to it all together as a sort of at least a first draft audio file and do the exact same thing, put all the notes in here. And then those notes are incorporated into something called to notes mix. And those are, instead of us all getting together, we all kind of listen on our own and we put little notes in. Yeah. And then Martine mixes it and then it comes out and it really is like, it's a long process and editing is a much bigger chunk of it than reporting, I would say. And so every story has been touched by, you know, like at least, you know, five or six people, like it's a big group effort.