A Good Walk Spoiled

Rich people and their addiction to golf: a philosophical investigation.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I have a friend who lives in Brentwood, on
the west side of Los Angeles, between Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica. He is a little poolhouse in his backyard
and I stay there whenever I come to LA, kind
of like cato'calon if your memory for O. J. Simpson
Esoterica goes back that far. Anyway, my friend's street dead

(00:39):
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 at LA is famous for.
If you drive down Wilshire Boulevard into Beverly Hills, ten
minutes east of Brentwood, you go right past Los Angeles

(01:00):
Country Club, which costs maybe a quarter of a million
dollars just to join. That is, if they'll even consider
your application. There's bel Air Country Club just north of Ucla,
which might be the most beautiful golf course in the country.
Hillcraft Staff Pico Wiltshire country Club in Hancock Park. I
could go on. They're everywhere, vast, gorgeous and private. The

(01:27):
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. And there's one

(01:52):
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.

(02:21):
This episode is about the problem with golf. I hate
golf and hopefully by the end of this you'll hate
golf too. I'm standing who would die day Zac, who
is a very successful landscape architect, Santa Monica, And we're

(02:45):
on the corner of seventh Sente and Berlin Game and
we're looking into the Brentwood Country Club and the first
thing I see is barbed wire. Looks like a couple
of layers of barbed wire. This looks like it looks
like the Berlin Wall. I don't think they want us
to get in there. What are you? What are we seeing?
We're seeing this move a little closer here. What's that

(03:06):
stand up trees? Do you know what those are? That
looks like silkoakes in the foreground? And then I see
a Sadrus deodora, quite lovely. Lots of larger trees, which
are unusual in Los Angeles because there's so little open space. Yeah,
there's some Pinus canariensis. Looks like a redwood in there.

(03:28):
I don't think dai Zak 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. Well,
first of all, I would get rid of the two
layers of bar lare the whole Eastern European feel East
German field would have to be corrected. I mean, that

(03:50):
might be some people's bag, but it's not very welcoming. Yeah.
The typical golf course is two hundred acres, give or take.
That's a lot of land. You have to landscape. Bit
mow it drenched in pesticides, keep the sand traps perfect.

(04:10):
I read somewhere that when a fancy golf course rebuilds
its bunkers, it typically takes about three hundred and eighty
nine truckloads of sand three hundred and eighty nine 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

(04:33):
severely limit the number of people on the course at
any one time. Typically, a good private course can handle
no more than seventy two golfers at once. So that's
one golfer per one hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred
and thirty three 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,

(04:56):
a basketball court would be thirty acres. Picture that that
had to play on motorcycles. 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.

(05:20):
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 gold mine
to be able to calculate your handicap and track it
through time. You will log into the system either at

(05:43):
your course or on your home computer. 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 dollars stock option and
a golf stream five, 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

(06:06):
like Biggerstaff. And you input are you played, and what
day you played on, and what your score was, and
you know, after a certain number of rounds being played,
the USGA will 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 you know how you always hear that CEOs play

(06:27):
a lot of golf. Bigger Staff'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, we started while as a PhD student,
and so the certainly was a multi month process. So

(06:49):
it's not something that necessarily want to repeat in the
near term just because it took a lot of collection time. There,
how can you not love this? Surely this is why
God invented graduate students. Bigger Staff begins with the names
of the heads the top fifteen hundred publicly held companies
in the US. Three hundred and sixty three of those
fifteen hundred turn out to be so obsessed with golf

(07:10):
that they enter their scores into the USGA database. What
you're seeing on average is I think fifteen rounds a year.
It's kind of the average CEO is 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 twenty two or more rounds

(07:31):
per year. And if you go to the top ten
percent of Bigger Staff sample, the CEOs are playing around
at least thirty seven times a year. A round of
golf is a good four four and a half hours,
So if you play thirty seven times a year, that's
more than one hundred and sixty hours on the course,

(07:51):
the equivalent of five and a half weeks of work.
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 that you don't enter into the database,
like if you're only playing nine holes or playing a

(08:13):
fun round, so the real time is probably way higher.
Bigger Staff then goes on to show that the more
golf of CEO plays, the worse his firm does, and
also that the more golf of 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

(08:34):
Wall Street investment bank bear Sterns. They went bankrupt during
the mortgage crisis in July of two thousand and seven,
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,

(08:55):
he couldn't stop playing golf. Out of President Donald Trump's
first four months in office, he visited his own golf
courses twenty five times. One week he played three times.
You would think he would be at the office learning
how to be president, reading intelligence briefings, drading the swamp. No,
he's golfing. It's an addiction, right, because the definition of

(09:17):
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

(09:39):
guys the highest and the sample one hundred forty six
or one hundred forty eight rounds recorded in a single year,
which I mean at that point, that's a tremendous amount
of time it's been on a golf course. You thought
I was engaging in hyperboly, didn't you that I was
using the word addiction metaphorically. One hundred and forty eight
rounds a year is a round of golf every three days,

(10:01):
and that would be if it was kind of uniformly
distributed across the year. It's you know, golf certainly has
a season where it's a little bit more sense in
terms of the summer versus the winner. And you can't
tell me what company is. I want to know what
company is. Yeah, this we're just with this data, given
it somewhat sensitive, we're unwilling to name out CEOs. I

(10:26):
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 one
hundred and forty eight rounds of golf a year and

(10:48):
is so completely unself conscious about that fact that he
posts all one hundred and forty eight 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

(11:08):
a little more respect. By the way, this is my
fifteenth year in television. Imagine that fifteen years of me
the longest stomach test in the history of show. You
could argue, I would say in the forties and fifties
there was no one who was more widely popular in
American than Bob Hope. I'm talking to Richard Zoglin, Bob

(11:31):
Hope's biographer. I think Bob Hope has been a little
forgotten in recent years, but in his day he was huge.
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

(11:51):
on in Hollywood, what was going on everywhere, and he
was just the voice of America. I think for a
long time. 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

(12:12):
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

(12:33):
I have a one acre plot and the fanciest part
of Manhattan that I used to grow vegetables, I can't
say to the city that land is worthless, it's just
a vegetable garden. No, 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,

(12:53):
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 nineteen sixty,
California's country clubs realize they have to act or they're

(13:14):
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. They
want their vegetable garden to be taxed as a vegetable garden.
If you think about it, this is seriously audacious. Private

(13:35):
golf courses are these massive, opulent, gated playgrounds, and membership
is often restricted. In Los Angeles in nineteen sixty, 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

(13:57):
they argue this, They don't, not really. They just bring
him 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. I spent so
much time in Santraff they sent me citizenship papers from
Saudi Arabia. Oh yeah, I love to hear the whole.

(14:18):
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 two thousand different
golf courses over the course of his life. He belonged
to the Lakeside Country Club in La near where he
lived A little of the pious, Yes, I think so. Yeah.

(14:40):
The genius at picking Bob Hope is the face of
California's country clubs is that his whole persona, his whole act,
was about being everyman. 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. Isn't this wonderful all being here in California?
I just love it. Look at that sky. That's the

(15:00):
only place in the world where you can get four
seasons in one day. I want to tell you that
this is the vie. We're better. Hurry, we'll be It'll
be snowing before the third hole. Yeah, let's move on.
Oh boy, So, how did the Bob Hope for Golf
campaign do? In nineteen sixty It wins, The proposition passes,
and it's added to Article thirteen of the California Constitution,

(15:21):
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 turned 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.

(15:42):
If you get my drift to give me back, just
should like totally understand Prop thirteen properties past in nineteen
seventy eight, and what are the principal stipulations of the proposition.
I'm in a big conference room in the Los Angeles

(16:03):
County Municipal Building, one of those beautiful nineteen thirties office
buildings that are all over downtown Las Ange Angelists. 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

(16:23):
the tax system. These are serious folks, deliberate, thoughtful. They
have promised to help me. You'll have to guess what
they really think. The tax rate is set is one
percent of the value, as opposed to a variable rate,
which it was before. Demand speaking is Brian Donnelly. He's
talking about the most famous amendment to the California Constitution,

(16:46):
Proposition thirteen. 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. 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

(17:07):
doubles in value, the local government will raise your taxes accordingly.
That's the way property taxes work, except in California. Proposition
thirteen said that for tax purposes, the value of any
piece of property in California is frozen at pre nineteen
seventy eight levels, and the only way that property can
be reassessed at its real current value is if the

(17:30):
property is sold, or, to be more specific, if ownership
of more than fifty percent of the property changes hands.
In other words, California has two kinds of taxpayers, the
post nineteen seventy eight people who pay normal property taxes,
and the people lucky and old enough to be living
in the same house they owned in nineteen seventy eight,

(17:51):
who pay a tiny fraction of their fair share. You know,
I've got family members who owned their houses nineteen sixty nine,
and they're paying I think their TAXI values about ninety
thousand dollars or something like that. The houses in that
neighborhood sel for six hundred, so it's so they're paying
a lot less than It's the proper teen conundrum, which

(18:11):
I'm sure you've read about. 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

(18:34):
are people whose property hasn't changed hands in forty years. Okay, now,
imagine that you're a private golf club. You did that
spectacular bit of jiu jitsu with Bob Hope in nineteen sixty,
which means that you don't pay real property taxes. Gift
from God number one. Then comes proposition thirteen, and you

(18:55):
get a second gift from God because proposition thirteen says
that those already artificially low property taxes are now frozen
forever at nineteen seventy eight 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,

(19:16):
then you have to pay real property tax like every
other long suffering California taxpayer who hasn't been in one
place since nineteen seventy eight. 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

(19:37):
they have not changed hands, and for years everyone assumes
they haven't changed hands. I mean Brettwood, LA country Club, Wilshire.
All the major golf clubs were all founded before nineteen
seventy eight, but Then a neighborhood newspaper called the Los
Angeles Garment and Citizen runs an article January sixteenth, twenty ten,

(20:00):
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 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. That question was put to

(20:23):
Rick Auerback, who was then the head of tax assessment
for Ella County. I think the quote was kind of
funny for him. You said something about, let's see on
most issues we haven't heard at least the question asked
before he said, Who'd worked in the office thirty nine years,
But this was a new one. So Auerback refers the
question to the city's lawyers. They put their best and
brightest legal minds on it for six months, and on

(20:44):
June second, twenty ten, 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 Ellie's private country clubs have gotten in
the last fifty years. I was talking to someone who's
a member of Feller Country Club, okay, and I said,

(21:07):
what percentage of the members of bel Air today? We're
members in seventy eight and he said, you know, ten percent?
So why isn't that a change of ownership? 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

(21:28):
that is more than fifty percent of a transfer, then
it's not. Each of those little individual slices are not
a change of ownership on their own. Did you find
that argument plausible? Well, it's prop Yeah, that's that's were
implementers of the law. You don't have opinions. No, Well,

(21:50):
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. Well, you the question is
if you change, If you have a ship and you change,
it's like some ancient greeking, and you change one board

(22:11):
at a time, is at the end of the day
as a ship different. That's what this is. The thing
I can't remember is a ship of theseus. The famous
thought experiment described by the Greek philosopher Plutarch roughly two
thousand years ago. Plutarch says, imagine theseus is sailing on
a ship, and one by one he replaces every one

(22:33):
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 meriological theory of identity.
The identity of something is the sum of its component parts.

(22:55):
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 and the form or
shape of the object is preserved to the changes of
its component materials. I think you can see where I'm

(23:18):
going with this. The city's lawyers take the 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

(23:38):
golf courses of nineteen seventy eight. Collections of rich white guys,
from the standpoint of the La County property tax system,
possess spatio temporal continuity. 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

(24:00):
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 on too logical permanence.
Here's an argument that favors the space EO temporal continuity theory.
The idea that what makes the ship persists through time

(24:21):
as one and the same is that it moves smoothly
through space time. One plank is removed and thrown overboard,
and a replacement plank is installed taken from the cargo
the ship has on board, 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

(24:42):
no point at which you can say, aha, now we
have a new ship, a different a numerically different ship.
So that if you have that sort of argument in mind,
you think, okay, the Space Show temporal continuity criterion is
the correct one. Forget about requiring that all the parts
are the same. But Cone is not finished as a philosopher.

(25:02):
His job is to consider all the scenarios raised by
the ship of theseus conundrum, like the museum count example.
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.

(25:24):
They would easily be spotted. So they come up with
a clever scheme. 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. By the
time they're finished one day number n they have all
end parts of the ship removed. Now they reassemble them

(25:45):
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.

(26:07):
Cohen's point is that there's no sim will 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 LA Board of
Equalization did. They just waltz into a philosophical conundrum that
has bedeviled some of the best minds in the world
for two thousand years and declare victory and say, oh,

(26:29):
it's definitely option one spatio temporal continuity. 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

(26:51):
of extra metaphysical, something pragmatic, that helps that tilts you
in one direction or the other. So what's the pragmatic,
extra metaphysical consideration here? It's at 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

(27:12):
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 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 La Country Club. That guy's

(27:33):
back of the envelope calculation was that the club's land
was worth about six billion dollars. But that was a
couple of years ago. Then I heard from another guy
who said that they now think it's worth nine billion,
nine billion. Under normal circumstances, the property taxes on that
much land would come to about ninety million dollars a year.

(27:53):
Do you know what LA Country Club actually paid after
you add up the Bob Hope exemption and the spatio
temporal continuity ruling two hundred thousand dollars give or take all. Right,
let's do the math together. They should be paying ninety million.
In fact, they're only paying two hundred thousand dollars in
property taxes. Ninety millions two hundred thousand dollars is eighty

(28:18):
nine million, eight hundred thousand dollars. That's how much the
tax bearers 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.

(28:44):
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. It's like, you know, the water's up,

(29:07):
the same boats go down on it. You know, it's
never that he never looks the same way twice ever,
But we continue to call it the Hudson River. But
it strikes me that in a political context, as kind
of thinking can be used to perpetuate inequality and injustice. Interesting,
for example, what is the what is an aristocracy but

(29:29):
a political formulation of the spatial temporal continuity principle. Right,
it is something like that, and it's it's troubling it
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

(29:49):
peerage remains intact. It has this quality that's independent of
all that's going around it. And that's yes. Where 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

(30:11):
one time, then basically that removes change altogether from the
realm of what matters as far as ownership is concerned. Yes,
so the seventeenth 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 attached to

(30:35):
the original holder of them. So there is there is
something that is unfair and anti egalitarian about the way
this principle can get applied. So the golf clubs of
Los Angeles are essentially aristocratic institutions exactly. I think someone

(31:04):
needs to tell Bromwood in La Country Club and all
the others that if they want to hold space she
owed 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

(31:25):
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, Saint 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 summer. The rest of the

(31:48):
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

(32:08):
sen the sen day in burling game that golf remains
an instrument of medieval privilege. I mean when you fly
over LA, the green space that you see is cemeteries
and golf courses 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 Parks Central Park. Guys,

(32:30):
Doc and I are standing outside the barbed wire or
Brownwood 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 LA. I see one, guy,
I see one. That's unbelievable. It's a Saturday afternoon. Sun
is now coming out, like right now. We're standing on

(32:52):
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 see if
you can still see any kind of I'm still looking
for a golf off. I'm not I see one. You
see one? Yeah, that's very exciting. Yeah, next time I'm

(33:19):
climbing defense, maybe we all should. Origion's History is produced

(33:40):
by Meila Bell and Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,
and Clmr Martinez, wife our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn
Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special
thanks to Andy Bowers and my old pal Jacob Weisberg.
At Panoply, I'm Malcolm Bradwell.