Talking Headways Podcast: The Urban Truth Collective

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, Tom Flood, Grant Ennis and Brent Toderian discuss their new communications project, The Urban Truth Collective.

Flood, Ennis and Toderian discuss pushing back on falsehoods and conspiracies through positive messaging around cities.

Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.

Jeff Wood: You mentioned repetition. How important is that?

Tom Flood: Very. I mean, we’re up against obviously an auto-centric dominated space and oversaturated space for, you know, almost a hundred years. So, you know, we can put our message out once, but the idea of reinforcing that message is really, really important considering the uphill battle that we obviously have.

And I think talking about kind of walkable neighborhoods, and I think it’s so important to, when you look at the benefits of a walkable neighborhood for your kind of average person, it’s so clearly beneficial to, you know, regular folks to move through their city easily, right? All the things that we’ve been told that are bad for us, this kind of conspiracy side is completely ridiculous.

As a parent, to speak for myself here, there’s nothing better than kicking my kids outta the house at 8:00 a.m. and they can go walk to school by themselves. I get more time for myself. I can sit at home, send them to the store to get me something. I can sit back, listen to a record, read a book.

These are all selfish things, and I think we should start playing in that space and sell some of these benefits targeting people’s selfish interests, right? Like, what’s in it for me? I don’t care about a bike lane, but I might care that my kid can get to school by themselves and I can have some time to myself.

And as a busy parent, getting through life is chaos. So the more time that my kid can do things on their own independently, which of course is good for them, but selfishly I get time to listen to music and, and play some guitar at home.

Jeff Wood: Alleviation of time poverty.

Tom Flood: Yeah.

Brent Toderian: Can I jump in on, on the repetition point? I wanna make this point. I have had arguments with urbanists about social media, about the fact that I repost the same post more than once. The mindset of some urbanists, and it’s always the urbanists who say this, professionals who say, you know, oh, you post the same post once a month? Yes, I do.

Imagine the car company only running their car commercial once a month. They run it three times per commercial break during football games, right? Because they understand that repetition works. Grant, what’s the quote that you use in the reframing that, “The best determiner of an idea resonating is how many times they’ve heard it.” Is that right?

Grant Ennis: Yeah. Frameworks Institute. Exactly.

Brent Toderian: So I’ve been criticized by urbanists for reposting my posts once a month, and I sort of say a polite version of, you’re crazy if you think you can post something once and claim mission accomplished. The enemy forces know that’s not true and they’re repeating over and over again.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s frustrating. I mean, the competition you’re up against. I mean, I’m just thinking about, you know, in global politics, too. I mean, thinking about like the bot networks and the amazing amount of just, like, flooding the zone that happens because of the way that people actually do understand that actually works over and over again. And so that’s, that’s super frustrating.

Brent Toderian: We really need to change our approach, our attitudes, our biases, our norms, our sense of politeness. Because we’re way too polite and we have to rethink all of our tactics if we’re actually gonna win. Because right now we’re losing.