OK, so before we get started, before we
get to Vegas comments, actually I
wanted to say a few things about David Bowie.
And if that doesn't interest you, that's fine,
you can click here.
We'll put a thing, put a link in the bottom
too so you can go right to Las Vegas comments.
But I think that the outpouring of grief and celebration
and sadness and everything else that's
happened since David Bowie's death has been really important
and I think worth talking about, at least a little bit.
And so I kind of just wanted to talk
through that, maybe just as much for me as possibly for you.
So but before we do that, I've got to do one thing.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Yeah.
So I think, you know, in my life there
have been maybe five songs that had a huge impact on me.
And they were things like "You are Invited"
by the Dismemberment Plan, "Vaseline Machine Gun" by Leo
Kottke, "The Park and the Backyard" by Robert Ashley,
and "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie.
And like a really good song, a great song
does this incredible thing where it
answers a question that you didn't know
should have ever been asked.
It does this thing where it defends its own characteristics
with this confidence where, when you first hear it,
you simultaneously didn't know that such an arrangement
of things was even possible.
But also it's this perfect expression of exactly
whatever that thing is.
It's like opening up this door and seeing
this perfectly furnished room that you
had no previous conception of.
And I think for a lot of people, myself included,
David Bowie did that not just with his music
but also with his persona.
Because, I mean, a bisexual alien rock superstar.
Like, here's me being 13 and not yet knowing a lot
about the world, though thinking I know it all, thinking, like,
wait.
You can-- you're allowed to just invent?
And I mean, of course you are.
Of course you are.
And I think in all of his instances--
and there were countless of them--
Bowie was this type of person where you didn't know
that this kind of person could exist,
yet there he was, being it perfectly.
Just constantly reinventing himself, reinventing
characters, and showing his audience,
like, just over and over and over again throughout his life
and throughout ours how the world and people and art
and fashion could be.
I think losing a creative hero is really hard because, you
know, it feels silly because you didn't
know these people as people.
You didn't hang out with them.
I didn't know David Bowie.
But he was a person who showed me countless things
about not only the world but myself.
And I think that that's, you know--
that the group of people for whom that is true is sizable.
And I mean, we can talk about how we spent all of this time
with his work and his work was maybe deeply personal.
And so it feels like we got to know David Bowie as a person,
and that's why we're sad because we
spent all this time with his creative output,
his body of work.
But really, I think that in more ways,
his work helped us get closer to ourselves and not to him.
Doubly so, I think, because there's almost
a different David Bowie for every person,
if not a different David Bowie for the same person
at different points throughout their entire life.
And I mean, that is a magical accomplishment
to be able to do that.
For this, we wanted to do an all-Bowie version of the record
wall just as kind of like a tribute.
So I went online to a bunch of stores, ended up
calling a bunch of places, and his entire discography
is sold out everywhere.
I cannot buy David Bowie records.
If I had an infinite budget, they're just not available.
That's, I think, right.
That's, you know, how it should be.
So ground control to Major Tom, you really did make the grade.
I think you did everything you could.
So thanks.
All right, let's talk about Vegas.
So first and foremost about the Vegas episode,
I just want to say thanks to everybody
who has been encouraging about us trying something new, which
is always scary.
And is doubly so if we try it and then everybody
hates it and is like, how dare you change anything, ever?
We hate change.
So thank you a million times over for all of your support
and all of the positive reactions and everything.
It really-- it goes a long way.
It means a lot.
Edmond Rangel compares Vegas to Venice.
And actually, I think sort of this comment acts as a nice way
to organize thinking about the comments
as we go through them, which is, there's
this consistent question, it seems, about who Vegas is for.
And we touched on this really briefly in the episode
that, you know, the Strip in paradise
is for people to come and relax and have fun and gamble
and play.
But there are, you can't deny the fact
that there are people who live there.
And so that tension is something that
is maybe more central to the weirdness and the uniqueness
that is Vegas than we gave it credit in the episode itself.
So yeah, this is something, I think,
to just sort of keep in mind as we're talking
for the next couple minutes.
Relatedly, PHDand30 talks about how
Las Vegas is a relatively young city in two different ways
in that it is maybe experiencing some growing pains in realizing
that its infrastructure needs to account
more seriously for the people who
are there who are not tourists.
And this made me think.
If you think of the history of imperialism
as stopping certain countries around the world
from learning how to govern themselves
and then learning how to build their own infrastructure,
learning how to build and manage their own governmental bodies,
I wonder if you can think about Vegas
as sort of like a land that was colonized,
that's sort of suffering from the history
of economic imperialism.
That Vegas never learned to grow up because it didn't have to.
And that it had some other thing kind of taking care of it,
in some sense, and that was just this constant influx of cash
over the last 100 years.
Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense,
but I was thinking about it on the drive to the studio today.
All the letters also on the Subreddit
talks about how Vegas might actually
be a really great set of ruins not just for the United States
but for the world because of the countless simulacra
of buildings from around the globe, that as a set of ruins
it is a castle and a pyramid and the Statue of Liberty
and all of these other big and important things.
But also they make the great point
about the dam, the Hoover Dam, being
maybe an even greater and more confident site of ruin
in the distant future.
And I think this is a really, really great point
and something that we didn't really touch on it all.
It was silly to have mentioned the dam
and to have talked about the architecture of Las Vegas
but to not have connected the two
as structures related to confidence and access
and power, literally, than we did.
So yeah, this is a great point, and I'm just now thinking
of alien civilizations millions of years
from now coming down and being like, hm,
wonder what this thing was.
Patrick Frost had one of a couple comparisons
between Las Vegas and China, which
is a thing that never even dawned on me,
that connection I never would have made.
And I would be really curious to hear what everybody else thinks
about this.
But it's kind of this idea that there
have been many dynasties, many cultures over an amount of time
that have sort of come in and changed-- or developed,
rather, and changed the landscape
and sort of invested it with this really complex meaning.
And I think this is really interesting.
It feels weird to me to compare the long and complicated
and really rich history of China to something like Vegas.
But I can kind of see where this connection gets made.
And there must be something there because it came up
several times in the comments.
So yeah, what do you guys think about this?
THUNK provides an engineer's perspective
on ruins, which is fascinating in that there's
this idea that if ruins are standing, if a structure is
standing for millennia after it has been built,
then it is in some sense overbuilt. And that it should--
these structures should last for exactly as long as they
are intended to be used.
And so now we can ask this question,
I think, about casinos along the Strip as
whether or not they are disposable buildings,
in some way.
I think we sort of maybe tiptoed around that idea
but didn't actually confront it directly.
Which, yeah, I'm going to think about this.
This was a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others in the doobly-doo.
Erin Merriman, who is a local to Las Vegas,
corrects one of our central points, which
is that in that block where we said that there was not
one original building still standing,
that's not necessarily true.
There are still some buildings that
have just changed their facade.
They've changed owners.
They've had a little bit of an update or renovation.
But it is still the same structure.
And I think that this is a really important point
and maybe even just makes it more interesting
that the turnover or the sort of demolition of certain casinos
is, in some ways, more metaphysical
than it is physical.
And I think that that is just-- I think it maybe
makes the point even better.
But I don't know.
I've got to think through this.
But yes, thank you, Erin, for pointing this out.
We didn't know.
I didn't know that.
That didn't come through in the fact checking,
which probably meant that we didn't do a good job fact
checking.
And finally, on the subject of Nevada.
No one here on the East Coast says "Nevaada."
I talked to some people.
We mostly thought Nevada was a joke.
We didn't know that that was like a thing,
like a real thing.
And not only just a thing, but I found this great post on Quora,
someone asking what the actual correct pronunciation of Nevada
is.
And a linguist answered and said that, you know,
there's defense throughout history for either way.
But it is a shibboleth for people
who live in Nevada that it is a way to indicate that you
are part of the in group.
When other people say "Nevahda," they are wrong.
It's "Nevaada."
Which-- I love it, I think.
I just think it's interesting.
Because I had no idea.
Not going to lie, though.
Probably still going to say "Nevahda."
But I am also the person who says "jife."
So pfft.
Sorry?
Not sorry.
[MUSIC PLAYING]