Rick Weinmeier

Oh, I was in this country or I was in this city and I had to use the bathroom and I thought about you. Right. Nothing. Nothing warms my heart more than that. And I asked him. Are public toilets a public good? I would think so, right? I would argue that they're a public good.

They contribute to human flourishing, right? They contribute to the construction of our society and our communal well-being.

If you're worried about failing schools, public toilets don't necessarily capture the imagination of politicians or of constituents necessarily to the level that these other pressing challenges pose.

There were no doors.

I do remember that. There was a little bit of toilet paper, but no soap. It was just like hot, hot, hot because there was clearly no air conditioning. A lot of the toilets didn't have seats. I was just like, you know, miserable and exposed to the world.

Someone's going to have to come along. And we don't have bathroom police.

I would call this an across-the-board failure. I think it's a market failure. I think it's a regulatory failure. I think it's a public health failure. The average person needs to use the bathroom six to eight times a day. And the fact that you cannot fill that need is just shocking.

You go into Starbucks and you pay for a coffee or you go to Nordstrom's and you buy a shirt and then you can go and use the restroom.

Yeah. We all have. Right. And so in certain ways, we already have kind of this de facto pay toilet system. But we have this way of kind of dancing around what that need is.

And I don't necessarily fault them for that, right? Like, if I have an Italian restaurant, I want to be focused on providing the best Italian food for my customers. I don't want to necessarily be providing bathrooms to the rest of the public.

You are getting pay toilets. New York City has an exception that it can have pay toilets.