Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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 realized 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.
So here's a silly one, but it's so true is 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.
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.
I think another really interesting one is cost of space. And you see this play out in just the way the 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 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.
One theory I've heard for why startups have taken root in California, 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 as 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.
Yeah. So I grew up going to this town in Western New York called Chautauqua. My grandmother lives there. It's a small town of 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? And that literally stopped me dead in my tracks. 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 Chautauqua 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.
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 philosophical reason. I could answer this question in a lot of ways. I think on one hand, I could answer this philosophical level.
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