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b'In July, fresh out of a particularly useless focus-group session of the type with which all planners and local government types are familiar, Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn wrote an article entitled \\u201cMost Public Engagement is Worthless.\\u201d It touched a nerve with many readers, and it prompted longtime friend of Strong Towns Ruben Anderson to write his own response post taking Chuck\\u2019s argument even further: \\u201cMost Public Engagement is Worse than Worthless.\\u201d\\nChuck and Ruben have a friendship that for years has been characterized by this tendency to intellectually rhyme with each other. And in today\\u2019s episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck sits down with Ruben for a peripatetic, provocative conversation about the good life, the nature of human rationality, and how we use it\\u2014or fool ourselves into thinking we\\u2019re using it\\u2014to create the good life for ourselves.\\nRuben was an early reader of Strong Towns and a source of early affirmation for Chuck Marohn\\u2019s vision, when it was encountering substantial local pushback in and around Chuck\\u2019s hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. \\u201cI\\u2019ve spent a lot of my professional life being the guy in the room that everybody hates,\\u201d Ruben says. In his own career, he has pivoted from a degree in industrial design and a career designing supposedly environmentally-friendly consumer products to the more uncomfortable realization that a gentler form of consumption was not going to reduce ecological damage. He now consults on behavioral change in pursuit of sustainability.\\nRuben and Chuck talk about the human tendency to want to apply a sort of systematic, reductionist, scientific rationality to problems that fundamentally defy that approach. Much as Newtonian physics describes many phenomena well, but breaks down at very small or very large scales, so too does rational problem solving via spreadsheets and pro-con tables. \\u201cSo much of the harm that we do,\\u201d says Ruben, comes from not appreciating this mismatch between approach and desired outcome. \\u201cIf what you\\u2019re doing doesn\\u2019t work, it doesn\\u2019t matter if you do it bigger, or faster, or harder: it\\u2019s not going to work. What you have to do is something different, not bigger.\\u201d\\nToo often lost amid the dominant narrative of our culture, which says that we are rational problem-solvers who tackle grand problems, is the art and science of \\u201cmuddling through\\u201d\\u2014the subject of a famous essay by Charles Lindblom. Chuck posits that if we committed ourselves to this process\\u2014making modest experiments rather than trying to solve grand problems by anticipating every variable\\u2014we might actually make better decisions than we do when we grasp for efficiency and optimization.\\nRuben also describes how, in his own life, he has \\u201cdownshifted\\u201d away from the pursuit of efficiency. He is an avid gardener and raises animals, and says it\\u2019s not uncommon at the Anderson table to eat a meal where everything on the table was produced right there at home. That intimacy with the food we eat and the land we live off of, something that used to be a near-universal human experience\\u2014a century ago, the majority of the food eaten even in New York City came from within seven miles\\u2014has become one that is alien to most of us.\\nChuck wonders what this perspective might hold for a person in New York or San Francisco or Vancouver today. How does it relate to the argument that dense cities with elaborate supply chains\\u2014you can\\u2019t easily grow all your own food in a Manhattan apartment\\u2014make the most efficient use of scarce resources and have the least ecological impact per capita? Is the efficiency we perceive in these systems worth it? Or does it comes at the cost of a fragility that might be invisible to us until things go wrong, much as the 2008 housing crisis exposed the fragility of the suburban development model?\\nSays Ruben, being part of an unsustainable system is like falling from an airplane at 30,000 feet. You know you\\u2019re falling, and you know what the eventual outcome will be. But \\u201cwha'