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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And it basically froze property tax increases to, I think it's a maximum of 2% a year increase. Okay. And that ends up having a huge number of knock-on effects. One is it has a huge impact on the budget. And so, for example, my parents have owned a home in California since the early 1980s. And since the 1980s, the value of their home has appreciated a huge amount.
But the property tax that they have to pay does not appreciate too much. And one way that you can think of property tax is that it's something that makes sure that people are making good use of the land. Because if you are in a place that's super, super productive, let's say you're in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it's a place where there's a lot of jobs.
Usually the real estate prices will go up and having a higher property tax that reflects those higher prices is a way to basically send a price signal to people to say, hey, you should be here. You're going to be able to participate in this economy. And I say this descriptively, not normatively. That's just actionably what it does.
And when you end up freezing property taxes at a much lower level, you end up deadening that price signal. As a result, I was walking around San Francisco yesterday and there's this empty lot. I looked it up and it's in a very central place, in a place where people are paying thousands of dollars a month for rent for a crummy little apartment.
And then there's this empty lot where people would love to live if only someone would build a building there. And I looked it up and the owner had just owned it for decades. And so their property tax is super low and it doesn't cost them very much to just hold on to it indefinitely. And so you end up having this empty lot in a place that otherwise could house a lot of people.
And so rules like Prop 13 make a huge impact on how people live and how people end up using space.
I joined the Stanford Review, which is a smaller paper on campus and at times somewhat controversial. I joined because when I read it as an incoming freshman, I thought, wow, this is a place where people can really talk about ideas seriously. They can take these ideas seriously, even if there's taboos and things that maybe we're not supposed to talk about.
It's a place where I can actually explore that. And it felt like there was an intellectual freedom and curiosity that I didn't always feel was super common on the Stanford campus. And it wasn't that I agreed with everything in the paper. Actually, there were many things that I strongly disagreed with, but that was kind of the point.
I liked that there was a diversity of viewpoints and people who would challenge me and ask hard questions. Whereas I felt like A lot of the rest of the discourse that I found on campus felt much more like one track mind. A lot of things that people would write, I felt like anyone might have written. And I just didn't feel as challenged.
So I wanted to join the review because I want to seek the truth. And I don't necessarily think that I'm ever going to find the truth. But I think that being around people who will challenge me makes it much more likely that I make some progress on that.
I'm really glad you actually see that connection. So the way I think of tools for thought is environments to think in and cities are environments to live in. And sort of like what we were talking about at the beginning, the environments that we're in shape our behavior a lot. And I think the tools that we use shape our behavior a lot as well. And so we end up...
taking different actions as a result of the tools and the spaces that we inhabit. And so I actually think of it as a very similar thread, but manifests in very different ways. I basically believe that we are almost defined by the things that we put around ourselves and the tools and spaces that we use. And so making sure that those actually define you in the way you want.
I'm not saying it's very articulately, but I don't think of my identity as just myself. I think of it as also the tools and the places that I'm in and how they shape. Because when I'm in San Francisco, for example, I have very different thoughts and take very different actions than when I'm in New York City or when I'm in Miami or when I'm in Buenos Aires.
Those places end up having natural gradients in different directions. And I think that's similar with tools, where if you have a tool that makes it really easy to do one thing and much harder to do another thing, you're going to tend to do the first thing more. One thing I've been thinking about recently is I have almost too good of a feedback loop with my email inbox.
I have these hot keys, I have a system that I really like, and I say it's almost too good because I find myself drawn to responding to my email more than doing other types of work that I think maybe are more important.
And that's largely because I've basically turned my inbox into a video game where I have like a counter and I have like points and I'm burning down the number of emails that I've responded to. But if I step back and I think, how do I actually want to be spending my time? What are the problems that I actually want to be solving? Email is a part of that.
Email is a useful tool, but it shouldn't draw me in so much. And so I think of tools for thought is like building a video game for your life where you make certain types of actions a lot easier or more interesting and more fun.
Totally. This, I actually think, is the hardest part of this project is just the timelines involved. Every single step of the way takes way longer. My background is in software. I was a software engineer for many years, and then I ran a team of software engineers. And the iteration speed in software is so fast. You can deploy a change in literally three seconds if you want.
I mean, assuming you have a change done. In fact, I updated something on my website today, and it took literally 20 seconds. Nothing in real estate takes 20 seconds. Nothing. Even moving a shrub or something is not going to take you 20 seconds. And so this is something I've thought a lot about.
And it's a big part of why we have the pop-up village, Edge Esmeralda, the 30-day events that we host 15 minutes from the site. Because I asked myself, how do we take this huge thing and turn it into smaller bite-sized pieces that we can learn from? Because imagine if we create this whole site plan, we pour a bunch of concrete, we build all this infrastructure, we build these beautiful homes.
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