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- [00:00]
Dr. Nick Cowan
Foreign.
- [00:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Wednesday, July 30, 2025, from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and as you know, because it was in New York, there was a mass shooting in the city the other day. On the Gist list I talked about that was the same day there was a mass shooting in Reno, Nevada. And one got about a hundred times the coverage. The New York Times, which is the best and best funded newspaper in the city, did what it needed to do on the front page today. Gunman searched for NFL offices in attack that killed four by the way. I didn't realize this. If you would ask me in the last 25 years, has there been a shooting in New York that had more than four victims? I'd have said yes, probably several. But I'd be wrong. This was the worst mass killing in 25 years. So a lot of coverage is warranted. It's how the New York Times did that coverage that I take issue with, I guess you could say slight issue with, but it's something that I'm very close to, that I've talked about, that I have a lot of knowledge of. It was the fact that the New York Times had a lot of choices as to how to fill out its coverage. They did the main story with the inverted pyramid of the who, what, why, when and where. And that was the front page above the fold on the right, which is to say lead story. But they had a choice what to tag as the accompanying story. And inside the newspaper there was a story of the TikTok of the shooter's actions right before the assassination, filled in with some quotes from former associates. That's a Derrick story, but it's useful. There was a very nice and moving profile of the slain police officer. The story they put above the fold on the front page is in vengeful screed talk of CTE and a plea to study my brain. That's chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And I have always said that delving into and let us say elevating the motives of a madman, in this case, a self professed madman. In fact, his madness was in fact why he at least says he carried out the shootings. That's never a good thing. And this story was written by Ken Bellson, who covers the NFL for the New York Times. And for many years he was the journalistic driving force behind CTE accountability. He did not get a Pulitzer Prize. I know he would have liked to have been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but he was filing story after story which shamed the NFL about its pushing aside the risks of head injury and football and the long term effects. But now in the 10 years since he's been Ken Belson started that reporting, it's been chronicled and the NFL has a $1.5 billion fund to address that. And the they have safe tackling clinics. And there's now much more of a societal awareness of the dangers of concussion. And we should also say that for someone like this shooter who played at the high school level to blame the NFL is, well, again, it's an outgrowth of what he himself identifies as madness, but also like it seems more symbolic than even and you're probably thinking about this connection, Luigi Manjoni's critique, deadly critique of UnitedHealthcare. And in case you weren't exactly thinking about it right there in paragraph two of this piece, it also echoed a case that had nothing to do with football, the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. So I thought this New York Times piece, which is fine, it does have all the caveats and it does have all many of the facts that I've relayed to you. I thought that the placement and some of the emphasis was somewhat of an attempt to turn this shooter into a Luigi Mangioni, to turn the NFL into UnitedHealthcare. And look, maybe you would say both are scurrilous institutions that deserve accountability. But the NFL, and let's also stipulate just through self preservation, just so that it can continue being the multibillion dollar societally dominant cultural force that it is, has addressed the CTE issue. I wouldn't say put it to bed. There's always going to be a school of thought that football can't be played safely. But consider where we were a decade ago and how prevalent talk and discussion of the future of football was. Compare that to now and it seems like an entirely different era when Barack Obama had to solemnly consider if he had a boy, if he'd let him play football. And Malcolm Gladwell was boldly predicting there would be no football in a generation. And we look back at this era something like we look back at an era of bear baiting. There at the end of the New York Times piece, actual newspaper with an actual newspaper. There at the end of the New York Times piece, talking about the millions in settlements and the initiatives on safe tackling and how much the NFL has decided to address this issue, been forced to address this issue, thanks to Ken Belson and others, there's this line, the league's efforts largely worked. News of the disease popped up less frequently, though sometimes in disastrous ways. Aaron Hernandez has mentioned. Did the efforts work because news popped up less frequently or because incidents were less frequent? It's written, I think, with purposeful ambiguity and I'm not here to let the NFL off the hook, but I'm also very much not here to let a self professed madman drive my conclusions or my news agenda. On the show today, does it seem like 1999 is Redux is all over again? Well, that's what one New York Times columnist argued a couple of weeks ago. Sorry to pick on the New York Times, but also thank you New York Times for being a thought starter in the spiel. I argue I don't know, it only seems like the past is ever present, but wasn't it always ever thus It's a very 1999 centric spiel. But first, Dr. Nick Cowan is a British criminologist and he wrote a work in the publication Works in Progress. The headline grabbed my attention, how the War on Drunk Driving was Won. I'm always fascinated by this because within my lifetime, at the beginning, before I was drinking, driving or even thinking about it, this was a giant problem. And it's not as if it wasn't against the law. It just wasn't invade against or thought about that much. And then it was, but it wasn't the headline. And drunk driving is the way that Cowan argues his general thesis, which is hinted at in the subtitle deterrence alone might not stop crime. And that's what this piece and our discussion is about, using the creation of norms to stop crime and using drunk driving as the test case for that. Dr. Nick Cowan, up next. We're now going to tell a story about a success, a wild societal success. I should actually say societies plural, because my guest is Nick Cowan, is a criminologist at the University of Lincoln that's in the uk, also teaches and has an affiliation with nyu. And what he's writing about is something that maybe we take for granted as having been solved, but shouldn't. If we look at the recent history, it's drunk driving. And from our success as societies on drunk driving, he extrapolates a few other areas that we may yet achieve some success. Nick, welcome to the gist.
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Dr. Nick Cowan
Thank you Mike. It's a great pleasure to be here.
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Mike Pesca
So you begin by talking about your grandfather who was a doctor who like almost all of his generation, would drive drunk from time to time. Now, I know enough from having read your work, just this piece that you put this in there perhaps not only for narrative reasons, but to establish things like norms to connect with the reader, to explain that you are not a cold hearted car serial fellow, but someone who has a lot of sympathy for everyone involved in this story. Right. There was strategy involved?
- [08:59]
Dr. Nick Cowan
Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I must say actually the, this article began with, with the puzzle. It was, I mean, it was after having some conversations with the editors at Works in Progress magazine where the, where the article appeared. And they have an interest in crime reduction because they think that crime is a big barrier to establishing kind of livable cities. So it's a big issue that they're facing because they're often supportive of housing reform, basically allowing more people to move into cities. And they notice that when this comes up in debates, people are very concerned about crime and they're right to be concerned. And so they were kind of looking, well, how do you tackle crime? What do we really know about how to prevent crime, not just to detect it and punish it after it's happened? And I was kind of like looking around thinking, well, where, where, how can we figure that out? And then I realized, wow, there's something really strange going on that we haven't really talked about enough. And that's that some crimes can be committed by almost anyone. I mean, in inverted commas, you know, in the sense that, you know, all kinds of human behavior exists along a continuum. And I start thinking that everyone or nearly everyone commits some sort of crime over the course of their lives. So there's some ordinary crimes out there. And then I realised drink driving and occasionally killing people through drink driving is something which can be committed or has been committed in the past by a very wide variety of people, including people who would basically consider themselves and be widely considered upstanding members of a community. Like my grandfather, who served the UK military at the end of World War II as an army medic and then went into general practice, was basically a pillar of his local community.
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Mike Pesca
Saved many lives while endangering others potentially.
- [10:55]
Dr. Nick Cowan
Exactly, exactly. So there seemed to be a bit of a tension there. And it occurred to me that he would be quite concerned about harming someone in most contexts, but because a lot of his colleagues and peers would make the same risk analysis and would imagine that, well, maybe statistically they can beat the statistics, like they are a particularly good driver, including where they've had maybe one or two too many. And so they are exempt from that, you know, from that particular crime. They don't become a criminal just because they break the law. In that way. And while there's still an element of that in societies today, I was looking at the statistics in New York City and actually there's been a little bit of a spike in drink driving and drink driving related accidents in the last couple of years. It's much, much.
- [11:42]
Mike Pesca
Although I do have to tell you, this year we're on pace to set a record for fewest vehic homicides since almost ever. Isn't that amazing?
- [11:52]
Dr. Nick Cowan
That's fantastic. And the thing about criminology is I've noticed that including in academia, but also in the media, we tend to focus on the bad stories and the advantage of works in progress. I mean, its theme is like, how did we end up where we are now? And can we appreciate the situation that we've ended up in, like the levels of civilization where we have achieved it? And can we explain how we got there? And then I realized, well, this is a little bit of a puzzle. We have to explain how drink driving norms change so dramatically over the course of a relatively short time span. In the time span of norms, like a blink of an eye. 30 years is sort of what I was kind of looking at, where the kind of big change happened from 1980 to 2010. And that's a puzzle that kind of needs to be explained. And that means that we can think about how some other types of crime might be tackled using a similar strategy.
- [12:48]
Mike Pesca
Right. So norms is the answer, the usual answer for how Mothers Against Drunk Driving and those organizations gained societal purchase were listened to and were followed to the point where children, even for me, I'm a little bit older than I ever remembered drunk driving being anything other than anathemized, but it was the case. And you don't have to go back to your grandfather's day. For many, many years, just the idea of a designated driver was a phrase that did not exist. So there was a successful defining of a norm, propagating of a norm, reinforcing of a norm, and it worked. Drunk driving became a thing that good, reasonable people who cared about each other just wouldn't do. You'd be ashamed to do it. Now you bring in some other theories and also some great old papers from 1985 that I was reading through. About one. One researcher said it doesn't look like there's really anything we could do about drunk driving, so let's just essentially make the cars safer, which actually did happen and it worked. But you also bring in some examples of deterrence theory because it was thought that you can't just deter, punish people out of drunk driving, you have to also, or maybe only enforce the norm. But tell me how deterrence interacts with drunk driving to create a virtuous cycle.
- [14:15]
Dr. Nick Cowan
So, basically, deterrence is this idea that you can change the. The. The cost benefit analysis that people might be undertaking when considering whether to commit crime, or maybe not considering, but tempted to commit a crime in the. In the moment, or maybe when they're planning their evening, like what their transport plan might look like. And basically the theory is that people are going to take into account the likelihood of being caught, the severity of the punishment if they are caught, and harder to measure the speed at which they might be apprehended in the event that they're caught. When we look at some crime types, in other work I've looked at theft, it looks like the speed at which you're apprehended is particularly important for certain types of crime. But the theory is that we're kind of rational at the margin. We're not perfectly rational actors, but we're rational enough that if we can perceive the chance of there being a sanction, we might be tempted to do something else or to refrain from committing an offence altogether to find some alternative to drink driving in this case. Now, when you kind of look at it in aggregate and you kind of look at individual criminal justice interventions, it doesn't appear to do all that much. It's just like a few percentages here and there. But I dug into the literature and I found that. I thought that the best chance of making an impact is to kind of engage in prevention rather than waiting for someone to actually kill someone on the road. And the invention and the widespread use of the Breathalyzer, this is something that was particularly well done in the uk, done to a certain extent in some US states. And so you can see a reduction, but maybe not quite as systematic reduction for various reasons. And the advantage of the Breathalyzer, if you're kind of going out, you're testing people, either randomly or testing people who appear to be driving not as well as they should be driving, is that you have this opportunity to catch people before they've actually committed a more severe offence. If they haven't harmed someone, they've merely risked harm someone, then you've actually got a much wider range of sanctions that you can apply. So people aren't going to be too bothered if initially it's a kind of a hefty fine or a short driving ban if you haven't actually killed someone. And that means you can actually hand out a lot More sanctions and they don't have to be particularly severe at that level. And yeah, there's some good literature that suggests that at the margin that makes an important difference. So people who were caught out and were later tested again randomly or administratively, were less likely to be caught inebriated subsequently. And those who were caught substantially over the limit, just over substantially over the limit and then sanctioned actually quite hard. They were substantially less likely again to be caught over the limit subsequently. So in other words, their reoffending rate went down. Now this on its own doesn't make an enormous difference because it's just micro interactions, it's just people being pulled over by police. Perhaps the fact that police are pulling people over and people can see that even if they're not being pulled over has a bit of a deterrent effect as well. But mostly this is just like micro interactions that are making small changes to individual drivers. But on my account, if you combine this with a kind of, you know, with widespread communication, so public communication saying police are out there doing this and moreover the community approves of the police doing this, they approve of pulling people over, checking and making sure that they're driving safely, then that that kind of sends. Sends a message which eventually produces a tipping point such that people realise that in this community it's not just wrong and harmful, it's actually abnormal, it's deviant. And people actually worry a lot more about whether their behaviour is common rather than whether it's moral. People are worried about whether something's moral, but they're very worried about whether something would look weird to other people.
- [18:35]
Mike Pesca
Well, it is called a norm, which is normal. And that you have a good study in there about how the state of Montana was trifurcated. And they did a very clever study that just essentially convinced people 4 out of 5 people don't drink and drive. And then when they did follow up surveys about people who were maybe considering it, young kids, they would say, no, I wouldn't drink and drive. When they were, when they were treated to the study that showed just how abnormal it was. Yeah, but I was. And I also want to emphasize that even though we thought that deterrence wasn't really applicable that much in drunk driving and for many years it wasn't deterrence. Plus the notion that this is abnormal, if you do deter the action, it does make it more and more abnormal. So if you arrest or disincentivize drunk driving, it actually becomes true that it's literally less common and less normal, thus reinforcing the message. The But I Wonder when you are talking about, since we're getting to the, since you're getting to the overall point of what can be do what can be done with other kinds of crime. Is drunk driving different from the other, from most other kinds of property crime and violent crime in that you don't get anything after you drunk drive like one would with a burglary, and you don't exact revenge upon anyone. In fact, when you're drunk drive driving, you're essentially hoping that you get away with something so that there's no effect of you ever having drunk driven. And you can't even look back and say, you know, look what I got from that, maybe a trip from the pub that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So is there, is there a complication to drunk driving as a particular type of crime and applying that to say, burglary or violence?
- [20:27]
Dr. Nick Cowan
I think burglary and violence are certainly different, but actually, if you look at property crime, once again, these things exist along a continuum. So having dubbed my own grandfather in around his thing, I thought I shouldn't do anyone else apart from myself. So I acknowledge that when I was a bit younger and perhaps before Spotify and Netflix kind of took over the space, I used to download a lot of copyrighted material. And I would justify it to myself as like, I'm kind of like some kind of pirate libertarian, which, you know, people of a certain age and a certain mentality might do and go like, oh, you know, copyright is theft anyway. But of course, really I did it because it was convenient and I was very confident that I would not be caught and punished. And it was very common in my peer group to do that. So that's like one example. But even if we look at physical property, an enormous number of people will steal just a little bit at self checkout counters at supermarkets or grocery stores. So there's been some studies on that. I think about a fifth of self checkout users do that. And not just people who are doing it systematically or in a desperate situation. Either you'll get people who are perfectly high income or like, you know, they don't have to do it, but they kind of think, ooh, those Brazil nuts, they're looking pretty expensive right now. But what if I just scanned it and like inputted it as if it was like another packet of peanuts? Quite a big difference, you know, like several dollars difference in your, in, in your money. And, and you know what if I'm caught? You know, I can always say, oh, it was a mistake, or the machine did it, that kind of thing, there's always plausible deniability and that's common. It's also theft. It's a small amount of theft, but it adds up. In the world of logistics. They call that shrinkage as a kind of a nice way of putting it. But it's like it's going on constantly and it's done because people, well, they might justify it. Sort of members of the public who don't ordinarily engage in crime, they might justify it because it's like they're, they're stealing from a corporation. They're not necessarily thinking through all the dynamics of what it means if you're stealing from your local shop and what that means in terms of additional costs and additional security that eventually has to come come on down the line and whether a shop.
- [22:56]
Mike Pesca
I do it as a blow, I do it as a blow for labor. Because if we could show that the shrinkage of the self scan checkout overwhelms the cost of actually paying a human being, maybe they'll hire back the human being. So I don't, yeah, I don't support so many organizing efforts, but damn it, if I could make my voice heard through macadamia nuts, I will. By the way, the other thing that's interesting about the Napster example, if that's what you were doing, you're pilfering through and the self scan checkout example, is that it's also true that if it's more convenient to steal than to just pay the price, people will steal. That is true of both of those.
- [23:36]
Dr. Nick Cowan
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So it's at the margin where these things happen. But I would say that it means that fundamentally we can probably change an awful lot of crimes and prevent an awful lot of crimes by thinking about social norms. Because very few people, even people who commit quite a lot of crimes, are entirely immune to social norms. There's a handful, so we would call them psychopaths and we find them at all levels of society, you know, including, including running big, big businesses and engaging in large scale fraud and that kind of thing. There's even a few in academia that, you know, if you, if you kind of look and they even occasionally get discovered. But do you think, really, do you.
- [24:20]
Mike Pesca
Think that's where the non conditional offenders, and what's the word for that, by the way?
- [24:25]
Dr. Nick Cowan
Not non conditional offenders or potentially usual suspects, as I might say. So people. Well, the ones who aren't too effective. So the ones who get caught frequently, they become well known to police and so police tend to get a picture of the typical criminal as someone who is very immune to social norms, someone who really is like built very differently from others. And it's true there's a handful of people like that. But I think that the way that police are investigating crimes after the fact, that means that they encounter those sort of people a lot more and we perhaps underestimate the conditional offender. So people who are in a community where they're aware that there's quite a lot of crime going on and perhaps they're more likely to be victims themselves if people are growing up in a kind of high crime community.
- [25:13]
Mike Pesca
And yeah, that was a really good interview, and it continues to be a good interview. To Pesca plus subscribers in this, the regular feed. I want to respect your time and be a bit terse, but people want more and more of those people. I say yes, you've got it for the low, low price of 8.99amonth to be a Pesca plus subscriber, or just if you want to get rid of the ads, that'll cost you 499amonth. And I got to say, this is the best way to support the gist. There's always more insight to be gleaned from our guests. You also have only so much time. But if you decide your time is worth more insights or just supporting the jest, go to subscribe.mike pesca.com and I thank you in advance. And now the spiel everything old is new again, including very much that sentiment which came in mind as I was reading a New York Times piece. Let us call it an opinion piece. Let us let them call it a week in review piece. And it was written by glynis great name McNichol, identified as the author of the memoir I'm mostly here to enjoy myself, which is I can identify with certainly true. I too am mostly here to enjoy myself. Jury out on if the same can be said for my enjoyment of Glynis McNichol. She's also the host of the podcast Wilder Starts off interesting. A Reckoning with Laura Ingalls Wilder oh, Mom, Pa I don't think I'm going to be listening to too many more podcasts with the word reckoning in the subtitle. I like thinking, I like learning, I like considering. I like considering from all angles. But once the reckoning gets involved, I feel. I feel a little thumb on the scale, don't you? At least that's how I reckon. So her point is, and this is a point I've heard before, because everything old is new again. But there's some truth to it that the pop culture of 20, 26 years ago, very present today. And you see this in the fact that big stars on Netflix are Jennifer Aniston, maybe Adam Sandler. We don't seem to be able to recreate stars of that level. Your Sydney Sweeney's do not have a haircut called the Sydney or the Sweeney. But there was the Rachel. So Glennis, I'm going to use the first name I just so do love. Glennis says that had she gone to sleep on New year's Eve in 1999 and. And I suppose she was dreaming when she woke this. So it does go astray. It does in fact go astray. She writes that much of the world I left behind that night would still feel familiar. For instance, dolphins still have blowholes and make the noise. That is not what she writes. She writes that fast fashion hubs like Urban Outfitters are peddling baby tees and baby doll dresses. I don't know, she might be right. I don't know about those things. Right. Another one that I don't know is, is there something called an a frame dress or an a frame house? You could say a lot of things about dresses and women's fashion. I'll say, oh yeah, that is a thing that they wear. And then it turns out it's just a reference to a felt spinoff of Bewitched. She also says that what else is new? Again, it's point and shoot cameras like the one I toted into the city, flip phones and even smoking are making a comeback. This is a terrible example. If you wanted to illustrate the sameness between 99 and today, you'd go with the phone. The phone has changed most dramatically. I don't know, maybe some baby doll tea wearing hipster is using a flip phone. No one I know is. But then she gets to the pop culture and it's true. In May. And just like that, the Sex and the City spinoff premiered its third season. Gwyneth Paltrow graced the COVID of Vanity Fair in April. Jennifer Lopez opened the American Music Awards. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are starring in two of the season's summer blockbuster. Sean Combs was just on trial, but he wasn't on trial then. He was less on trial at the time. He's gone into a new phase of his career, I would say. TikTok, where are you going with this? Has granted Carolyn Bessette Kennedy been dead for a long time, a certain immortality and Ryan Murphy's upcoming American Love Story Is about the tragic arc of her relationship with John F. Kennedy Jr. All right, didn't know that. Maybe she's wearing baby doll tees. But all of these examples are about famous people. Celebrities who've been famous for at least 26 years, sometimes 30 years. Are you saying this is a new phenomenon? We haven't had longstanding famous people. I started to put together a list of not people who are famous now and also 26 years ago in 1999, but people who are famous in 1999 and also 26 years prior to that. There's a lot of them. Clint Eastwood, huge star in the 70s, Dirty Harry movies, the Westerns, was starring in films, directing films like true crime in 1999. Robert Redford, Big star, the Sting, the Way we were in 1973. The Horse Whisperer had just come out. Al pacino, the godfather, 72, Serpico, 73. He had just starred in the Oscar nominated the Insider. Love. The Insider has a great line about wandering the wilderness of NPR. Michael Caine was big in the 70s. Insider, House Rules. I think he won the Oscar for that. Or at least it was nominated in 99. There were plenty of big stars. There were plenty on TV that was on now. In fact, the TV of 99 was about the TV of 73 to some extent. I mean, who Wants to Be a Millionaire was the biggest show is hosted by Regis Philbin, a guy from the 70s. The Muppet show was back on the air. The original was from 76 to 81. That 70 show premiered in 1988 and was getting even bigger ratings in 1999. Explicitly built on the not at all unusual nostalgia for a time about 25 years prior. And then we have music. And I have to say the music of 1999 was almost indistinguishable from the music of 1993. Much more so than now when all genre of hip hop and its ilk dominate the charts. And singer songwriters can't find a foothold. Not at all true. In 1999. In 1999, the biggest touring act was the Rolling Stones. The second biggest touring act was Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band. Sure, in the top 10 you got your Nsyncs and your backstreets. But also in the top 10 you have Cher, Elton John and Bette Midler, big stars from the 70s. There's nothing new about this phenomenon. It won't stop me from going on because going on about arguments that don't quite get there that also never goes out of style. Glennis McNichol takes it from the world of pop culture to the world of politics. And she points out that in 1999, the senator from New York was Chuck Schumer. And dammit, he's still there. Well, yes, he is. But guess what? Right now, along with Schumer, there are Grassley, McConnell, Wyden, Durbin, Collins and Crapo. So seven U.S. senators who were serving in 1999. But in 1999 there were eight U.S. senators who were back serving in 1973. You're going to say Mitch McConnell was one of them? No, it only seems that way. It was guys like Ostrom, Thurman and Teddy Kennedy and Daniel Lenaway and Robert Bird who is there since, I think, the Grover Cleveland administration. So then the article spins out from its marshaling of the specific to a general point that that we might be having a nostalgia today because of things like anxiety and a threat of the apocalypse. And the apocalyptic millennial fear of Y2K is now being played out, but with more resonance and more believability with our AI or apocalyptic fears today. This is actually why I tend to discount fears. I've lived through more than a few fears that didn't quite pan out, and some that did, and some that was some that were unforeseeable, like what would happen two years hence from 1999. The article ends on a glimpse of the future. So why this might be a clean break from 1999. And of course, that break was. Can you guess it? What's in the air. What's in the air from someone who says flip phones are big and Baby Doll Tease and did the Laura Ingall Ingalls Wilder Reckoning. I don't know. I'm probably profiling Glennis Zoran Mamdani. This could be the big break. It's all different. Zoran Mamdani is what's new again. And in 1999, I don't know. Did we have anyone in the future who could possibly represent a new breath of fresh air? Someone also maybe with quote unquote, weird name whose parentage came from the east coast of Africa? Maybe everything old is new again. It would take eight years for Barack Obama. That's the guy I was talking about, by the way. Barack Obama to come into play. And it would take many, many more cycles of saying we've never lived in a time like this except 25 years ago. It's so strange how that was almost exactly like it is today. She also cites in politics that the 90s was when Donald Trump became an avatar for wealth and excess. No, it wasn't it was the 80s. And also, isn't the difference is there a kind of a difference between the cultural space that Donald Trump occupied in 99 and what he does today? Isn't that kind of a big difference when the president of the time was Bill Clinton and oh, did that man have appetites and excesses compared to Donald Trump? I would say difference in if you want to argue difference in degree, but not in kind. It's kind of a gigantic degree. What this piece is doing and pieces like this always try to do is essentially just engaging in a nostalgia and say, isn't it so coincidental that this time has so many resonances to today when basically it's just a time that the author and maybe the reader remembers and almost every time has a lot of resonances to every other time, to quote a TV show that debuted soon after 1999, Remember when is the lowest form of conversation. And that show was, of course, the Sopranos now being redone in terms of peak tv. And just like that, or whatever the hell the new Ryan Murphy show is. And that's it for today's show that just is produced by Cory Wara. Our production coordinator is Ashley Khan. Astrid Green runs our socials and Michelle Pesca is in charge of it all, but with a light hand. And thanks for listening.