YouSaid · the spoken record

Devon Zuegel

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-03-04
most recent: 2025-03-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Approvals yet of what you're allowed to build, that's considered the highest risk, but also highest reward part of any project. And some people do borrow money for that stage, but it's much harder to get land loans because it's higher risk. And frankly, it's also, I think, in my opinion not that desirable because you end up putting this ticking clock on your project. And at that stage, there's a lot of things that need to happen before you have any cash flows coming in. All those things I just mentioned, like the infrastructure and all that, and then also the vertical construction. And so for us, we strongly prefer to do land purchase with all equity. We think that if you're playing a long game and you really think that this is going to be a long-term value, it's worth not taking a loan. The downside of that is that when you do borrow and you leverage your returns and if things go well,”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let's split it up into a few different pieces because building a town requires a lot of different steps. So there's the land purchase. Then there's building infrastructure, which is the roads, the sewage, the electrical, et cetera, the gas. Then there's what's called the vertical development, which is what it sounds like. It's like the buildings in our case. We're going to be building a bunch of homes. There will be a hotel or two. There will be cafes and restaurants. There will be event spaces that I talked about. And each of those phases and pieces attracts a different type of capital. And I could say the options for how you could finance, and then I'll say how we're thinking about it. So one important principle is that the earlier you are in this project, the riskier it is, kind of intuitive. But when you're buying raw land that doesn't have any infrastructure on it, or if it doesn't have...”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making power that just applies across the whole country all at once. And so it gets rid of a lot of the evolutionary pressures that you would normally get in a more free market system. Those rules have evolved over time, but it ended up creating some conventions and norms around 30 or more mortgage. And also, frankly, if you're lending money as a bank for 30 whole years, you are even less risk. Just think about where this country was 30 years ago versus today. It's a completely different place. The whole world order is totally different. And so making a bet on that timeline results in people being extremely cautious and walking in the status quo.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some other government agencies stepped in and said this is not a tenable situation. We need to create some form of mortgage that is a much longer term so that people have a sense of stability in the place that they live, which I think is a really laudable goal. But when they ended up doing that, they created agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and they also ended up creating rule sets for what was and wasn't worthy of the home loan of a mortgage. And they ended up frankly locking in a lot of the ideals of what an ideal home was at that time period. And the people who just happened to be in charge ended up defining a lot of those factors. And so there were things like we don't want to give a loan to a home where the corridor is not at least this wide so that people can bring furniture in. Like they got into really granular detail, which might be a reasonable rule, but the thing is that this is a very centralized city.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the lenders want to see that there's comparables or comps that are used in the real estate industry. They want to see that there's comps for similar homes or units or buildings on the market. If you come in and say, I have this crazy new idea, I think it's going to change the world. They go, that's nice, but what do we get out of it? So that's one really important dynamic. Another important piece is through the FHA, the federal housing administration. During the Great Depression, a lot of people had taken out short-term, what are called balloon loans. And they were a few years, maybe five years long, very different from the 30-year mortgages that we had today. That was a huge part of the problem with the Great Depression. A lot of people's loans came due just when the depression was hitting and they were not able to get new loans. So many people lost their homes. The FHA, the Federal Housing Administration,”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So start with mortgages a mortgage is a loan, and it's really important to look at the structure of what a loan is. So when a bank lends you money, if things go really well with whatever you're doing with that money, they will get some interest on top of the principle that they gave you, but they don't really get the crazy upside if things turn out really well. However, if things go really badly, they lose their principal and they're screwed. And this is important because it means that lenders are inherently cautious. They do not want the borrower to take any interesting risks with that money because they don't get any upside from it. They only get the downside. This is to contrast against equity, which yeah also bears the downside if things go badly. But if things go really well, then they get to benefit from the upside. And so what this means in practices is that mortgages and other forms of debt end up locking in a status quo.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over the access, it makes it so that there aren't a lot of options for people who prefer that one. I don't think that everybody wants to live in a really dense walkable city. I think there's plenty of people who actually just want to live in a rural place or maybe a suburban place. But I do think that there are more people who want to live in a walkable community than there are walkable communities in large part because of this coordination problem.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Free of cities because of cars. Suddenly people could make unilateral decisions to say, actually, I prefer more space over more amenities. And for any given individual, that trade-off may have made a lot of sense. The one challenge with that is that you now are also affecting the rest of equilibrium for everybody else. Because when you go farther away, then suddenly you're also reducing the number of opportunities and interesting things happening in the core of the city. And so to me, one of the key things the car did was it changed the balance of that coordination problem. And I think one of the effects that I see is there are a lot of people who would love to live in a more dense walkable place and they would actually make the trade to say, I'm happy to have a slightly smaller home in exchange for more access. But because society at large in whatever city that they're in has decided that they all want to be a little farther away and they prefer the space.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And have the one house in the middle of Central Park and have all of Central Park as your own private yard and then also have all the amenities of Manhattan around you. I think a lot of people would take that trade. That would be the most popular house on the market probably in all of America. But on the other hand, people want access to amenities. They want access to their friends. They want to have access to job opportunities. And those two goals are directly at odds with each other. If you just think of the geometry of it, if you are closer together, there are more things close to you, but it also means that you have less space. One thing that happened naturally before we had the car was that people naturally stayed close together and there was very high like amenity value. You could access all sorts of things within walking distance because everybody else was also within walking distance. As the Pareto frontier shifted, as people could make different trade-offs and as more space opened up on the peripheral”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty short distance of their home and their work, and maybe they had some public transportation like trains or trams that could take them around, but they were constrained in how far they could go easily. The car opened up a new frontier on the outskirts of cities, and that's how we ended up getting most of our suburbs in America. And on one hand, it really increased the opportunities that people had. People were excited to suddenly be able to go a little farther off the periphery and have more space and have more land. So I think in some ways it was great. However, I also think of cities as a bunch of coordination problems. And there's many we could get into, but I'll speak to one in particular, which is that everybody's always making a trade-off between on one hand, people generally want more space, all things equal, people will take more space. If you could have a mansion in the middle of Manhattan.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, first, I want to say I am not anti car. Actually, I really love cars. And I think in my ideal world, they would still be there. But I think of cars the way I think of horses where they're a really cool hobby and they have some cool applications, but we maybe shouldn't be shaping our entire cities around horses. So first I want to say that up front. Sometimes people think that I hate cars or people in this direction hate cars. So you were asking earlier about why people don't build new towns anymore. And I think another answer to that question is at different times there are new frontiers that open up. And so when railroads started to become a big deal in the United States, suddenly land that was previously inaccessible from transportation ended up having a train station on it and towns would sprout up around those transportation hubs. And cars had a similar effect, which was previously people had to stay within walking or”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attacking what you're trying to do, it's usually just because they may not understand what it is you're trying to do, and it's an opportunity to talk to them about it. And those starting points can be scary or intimidating at first. I wasn't thrilled when I heard about this sign that he was making, but it is an opportunity to jump in and say, hey, I actually think that we might have more similar goals than you realize. And I think a lot of people don't realize that that is possible. And so maybe don't take the step to try. And don't get me wrong, you're not going to convince everybody, but many people, I think, are much more amenable to conversation and trying to find common ground than you might originally think.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, that reminds me of one of my favorite experiences last year when we announced that we were going to host Edge Esmeralda in Heildberg, a local who is now a really close friend of mine. He came to a city council meeting and he said that he was going to make a custom sign that said, don't colonize Healdsburg. Not quite the message we were trying to get across. We're actually trying to build this really strong community. But then he decided actually I'm going to give him a chance. I'll show up to their first event and see what happens. And he ended up loving it so much that he ended up attending more sessions than anybody else the entire month of the pop-up. And by the end of the month, he was helping us out. Us if he could run errands, go to the print shop for us, and ended up connecting us with a lot of people and just thought that what we were doing was super cool. And I found that really satisfying because it shows that just because someone might first seem like an enemy or something, they're coming out and”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we had last year at Edge was I invited the city managers of both Cloverdale and of Healdsburg, and I hosted them on a panel where they got to discuss their experience in local government. And that served a bunch of purposes. On one hand, it gave them an opportunity to talk about what they care about and got to highlight them. Also, the people on the edge Esmeralda community who are interested in moving into the community we're building give them a little more of a sense of the local region and the challenges and opportunities that exist. And afterwards, everyone chatted for a while. They got to ask a bunch of questions. And truly, I see this as a very long-term trust building exercise. And I think it's more like tending a garden than it is like anything else. You're sort of planting the seeds and it takes time for them to grow. You can't expect people to immediately trust you on day one.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Land, but we've already run a multi million dollar event that brought thousands of people into the Sonoma community and brought millions of dollars of business to Sonoma County. And we've collaborated with local artists and we've worked with restaurateurs throughout Hildberg and the surrounding area in Sonoma. The whole purpose is to build relationships in the local community so that when we do get to the point where we're building something, we actually are embedded and we understand what people want and what they are looking for and why they're excited and why they might be concerned so that we can adjust our plans accordingly. I think a lot of real estate development these days has become something that's imposed from above. Like someone with external capital has decided this is going to happen and then they're pushing it through and just trying to get it done. And people are more likely to react to that. One of the opportunities.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. That's one of the most important parts of this project. And I think of that as really a big trust building exercise. I think that this is a place where we've taken a unique approach. So to set a little bit of a backdrop, often in California, there's a lot of challenges to development. People tend to react, frankly, pretty negatively to people coming in and trying to build new buildings and new infrastructure for a variety of reasons. We've taken a different tact. Basically, instead of coming in as a developer first and saying, hey, we want to bulldoze this and turn it into a big parking lot. We first come in as a community organizer, people who bring people together and we've had opportunities to build trust in local relationships through Edge Esmeralda. And really our goal with that is to show the local community that we're committed partners. And we haven't even closed on the land yet to tell you just how early we are on the process. We haven't even purchased.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Foley ended up working on these solar A-frames over the course of the month where basically Nick had been wanting to work on this project for a while, I think, but had just never done it because life is busy and he texted the group chat where all of the attendees were and he said, hey, I'm going to be building the solar A-frames, which are basically camping shelters with solar panels on them. And so they have electricity. Does anybody want to help? And a ton of people raise their hand and he ended up having a whole crew of people help build this A-frame out in the redwoods over the course of Edges Meralalda. And we had no intention for that to happen, but it was one of the coolest activities. And by the end of the month, it ended up growing and expanding. And they built a whole campsite. And we ended up having a solar-powered night market by the solar A-frames where people cooked food. And it was a fun party. And it felt very solar punk out in the woods. And so that was one.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the ways that we organize edge is that it's basically a giant unconference, and for anyone who's not familiar with what an unconference is, instead of having the central organizers create a schedule and assign slots for speakers, we instead create a container for things to happen. So we provide the venues, any of the AV equipment, and we invite people. But then those people end up filling the slots and saying, hey, I want to do a presentation on the neurotechnology research that I'm doing. Or I want to run a yoga session. So it ends up leaning into that peer-to-peer concept I was talking about. People end up populating the schedule themselves. And what that means is that there were a lot of surprises, a lot of things that we didn't even intend to have happened, but were awesome. I think one of the activities that I enjoyed seeing really blossom at the event was my friends, Aunts and Yu and Nick.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time and place during the day, or you can come together and talk to the other people in the community. And honestly, we're taking a lot of lessons from how colleges work, like a dining hall where people come and you always know that you're going to bump into some friends.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the software side, we've actually gotten things started because it's going to take a while to build all that hardware. And so we've got it started with this pop-up village that we organized called Edge Esmeralda. And you can think of a pop-up village kind of like a temporary college campus. We host it in Healdsburg, California, which is 15 minutes south of the property where we're billing the hardware. For this pop-up village, it runs for 30 days each summer. And many people attend for the whole month, but also a lot of people come for just a week or just a weekend. Last year, we had 1,300 people attend Edges Meralda, and this year we think it might be even a little bit more than that. And with Edges Meralda, we're experimenting with a lot of these ideas. I think last year, one of the key things that we did was we hosted nightly community dinners, and they're not required to come. Many people will not come to every single night, but there's always one.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alluded to the hardware and software before, and so while we're currently building the hardware, which is functionally real estate development, I mean, at the end of the day, we're putting in infrastructure and we're building buildings. And that is what real estate development is. That's the hardware side. And that has a very important role to play in this, where as we were talking about before, environments really shape the behavior that we do. And so on that side, we are building infrastructure and public spaces and event spaces where people can have these types of events. Really, you can think of it like a college campus where we're going to have lecture halls and pavilions and things like that throughout the community that will support this type of activity.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On her experiences, and people talk about it for a little while, but then it moves on versus Jane Goodall herself being part of the community and then hosting an expedition with the kids in the community to go meet some chimpanzees and having it be more of a peer-to-peer where it's not sage on the stage, but rather the people around you are experts in their field, but you are also an expert in your field and creating that network. So I think those are the key values and experiences that I would love for people to have in this community.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And creation, but also of invention and building new things. I love the values that Chautauqua has. I think we would build on that. But I'll also point out two major values differences. I think on one hand, Chautauqua is much more about lifelong learning than it is about building. I think it's more of a place where you absorb a lot of information and experts come and talk. I don't want to downplay the cool things that Chautauquans are doing either, but it's much more emphasis on reading and consuming and learning. But I think I want to take that and build on it and also create more of a sense of action and people building businesses, creating pieces of art, doing research, that kind of thing. So that's one difference. And then related to that is having it be a sense of more like peer-to-peer. So in Chautauqua, there's more of this sense that Jane Goodall will come and she'll talk to you about chimpanzees. And she presents.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's so fun. Okay, I'll give you a little persona of the type of person that I think would particularly love living in Esmeralda. So basically, somebody who is an adult who's got a young family, but also maybe their older parents or even their grandparents are still alive, they can all live in this community together, which is my experience at Chautauqua. I would stay with my grandmother and we'd have three and sometimes even four generations all in the same home. And I think I'd like them to describe it as a place where their kids have a lot of independence and their kids can get around on foot rather than having to ask to be driven everywhere, a place where there's a really high level of trust within the community. And when you walk outside, you are very likely to meet people who share your values. And those values specifically being a love of learning.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, not a binary thing either. It depends on what your goals are. Is this community trying to be an industrial hub where a lot of big manufacturing happens is this trying to be a resort community where people can relax? Is this a place that's meant to be multi-generational or is it targeted towards a particular generation? And so tracking those things and building a very rich mental model of the specific details has been the most fun thing for me, honestly. That's my favorite thing to think about.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But way before I started working on this project, I've been really obsessed with urban design and in particular street design because I actually think that streets are the single most important building block in a city. The way that the streets interact and how they interface with buildings and other public spaces is really the thing that defines the feeling of a city, in my opinion. And I've been studying and writing about it and befriending architects and developers for the last 10 years and really my poor husband every time we travel somewhere, it's really an architecture tour where I talk to him all the time, like, oh, did you see the setbacks of this building from the street? Like, oh, it's interesting that they're mandating a 20 foot setback here. And so really the biggest answer I would say is from my travels and just taking really detailed notes and making a lot of observations about the choices that are made in different cities and what works and what doesn't.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we've done less and less of, and as that frontier has clothed the physical frontier, more and more of that space has been taken up. And a lot of the really good locations for towns and especially for big cities is probably also taken.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On some level, it shouldn't be that hard because we know how to build buildings, we know how to build roads. This is not rocket science. We're not making a technical breakthrough, but you are empirically correct that when you look around, there aren't a lot of new towns being built up. I think part of it is that there's sort of this sense that the frontier is closed in the United States. And I feel like it's more than just the physical frontier. I think that a lot of people in a lot of industries feel like we're at the end of history. And it's almost a more like philosophical reason. I could answer this question in a lot of ways. I think on one hand, I could answer this philosophical level. There's also a lot of technical reasons, but I think the biggest answer is just it's not in the space of things that people think are normal to do. But if you think about it, every town that exists had to be started at some point. Someone was the first person to move in. Somebody built that infrastructure. And I think it's just.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That literally stopped me dead in my tracks. Like, it felt like a movie almost. I was like, wow, that's a great question. Why isn't there? Because I'd been a fish in water, not really thinking about how Chautauqua came into being and why that wasn't more common. And so that was about five years ago now and took me down the rabbit hole and I just kept thinking about it. And basically I ended up realizing I need to build a new Shautaqua in California, which is my home state and where my family is and my friends and my network. And so basically I'm building a modern version of Chautauqua.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I grew up going to this town in western New York called Chautauqua. My grandmother lives there. It's a small town about 8,000 people. And it was built about 150 years ago. I'd visit her every summer. And the thing that's really special about Chautauqua is that for nine weeks every summer, Chautauqua hosts what they call the season, which has workshops, lectures, performances. It has a symphony orchestra, an opera, and a very active theater. You can kind of picture it like a college campus, except it's multi-generational. And I grew up going there, and it's been my favorite place in the whole world since I was a little girl, but it wasn't until a few years ago, I brought my husband there for the first time. And as we were walking around, he just asked me a simple question, which was, why aren't there more places like Chautauqua? Why is this the only one?”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially the apocryphal startup garages for all the early companies was because in California there are these garages that are warm enough most of the year that you can actually work in them. And there's sort of this extra cheap space that is attached to a lot of people's homes. And so they turned into the workshops of various inventors and people who created things. Whereas on the east coast, your garage is freezing cold half the year. So I think when you end up being able to treat space is something that's cheap and something that you don't necessarily have to pay for, you end up getting a different type of creativity coming out of it and more things that take a lot of physical space.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think another really interesting one is cost of space. And you see this play out in just the way a restaurant might treat you. If you're in a restaurant in Manhattan, you can tell that the restaurant wants you to eat your food, get out, pay the check so that they can turn over the tables because that seat is expensive for them. Versus if you're in a lower cost city where the real estate isn't so expensive, there's often a little bit more of a it's okay if you sit there for three hours and chit chat with your friends or at coffee shops in Manhattan. I think they often will glare at you if you ever have your computer out because they know that you're going to be sitting there forever. Whereas if you're in a diner in the middle of Nebraska, they're probably going to let you sit there for a while longer. So I think cost is really interesting. And it also shapes the types of activities that people do. One theory that I've heard, I don't know, it's hard to test this, but one theory I've heard for why startups have taken root in California.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at a more macro scale, I think how close you live near a friend makes a huge difference in how likely it is that you'll see them and the context in which you see them. So if you live on the same block, you might go just knock on their door and say, hey, what are you up to this Saturday? Let's go do something. But if you live a 10 minute walk away, you might text them before you go. And if you live 20 minutes away, you're going to probably plan ahead and you're going to say, let's meet at this time on Friday night. And so just realizing how much we are shaped by the distance of different things in our environments has been a huge unlock for me. And so I've tried shaping my own life such that the people that I want to spend the most time with are ideally as close to me as possible and the types of food that I want to eat and the types of activities I want to do. And I think it really makes a huge difference.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's a silly one, but it's so true if I have my phone next to me as it is right now versus behind my computer screen where I can't see it, I will not use my phone if it's behind the screen. And I'll just forget that it even exists. Versus if it's next to me, I'll check it every few minutes and see if I have notifications. And so actually I'm going to hide it behind my screen right now.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, such a fun question. I think it came from realizing just how much environments shape the way I think, the way I feel, and the way I behave, even from small things like the shape of the floor plan of an office can make a huge difference in the way that team members interact and the weather outside affects how much I go outside and the layout of streets ends up affecting whether I walk somewhere or I take a car and realizing I'm kind of obsessed with trying to make my life better and make better decisions. And I realize that it's way easier to make better decisions if your environment supports and enables it. And so I've gotten really interested in the question of how do I shape my environment so that it shapes me in the ways that I want.”
2025-03-04 · Invest Like the Best · Devon Zuegel: How To Create A New Town - [Invest Like the Best, EP.413] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source