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Episode 495: The Mirage of Nostalgia · Words & Numbers

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This week on words and numbers. Google Pizza.
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World War 2 munitions. And were the 1950s really all
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that great? All this and more coming up next
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on Words and Numbers, a Civil original production.
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Check us out at civil.com. That's C ivl.com.
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Hi, I'm James. And I'm Anthony.
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And this is words and numbers. Ant, what's new and exciting in
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your world this week? Well, I've gone down a bit of a
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rabbit hole. I ran across an article this
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week about a guy, I guess he was a owns a pizza store, number of
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pizza stores near the Pentagon, who some years ago noticed that
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right before there's some big political military thing
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worldwide, there's a spike in pizza orders late at night at
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the Pentagon. And apparently the, the Pentagon
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that you know, later on discovered this and said, Oh my
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God, we're signaling because everybody's there late at night
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doing whatever they do. So they Pentagon made
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arrangements to have, I guess I don't know that pizza or
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whatever, but subways and other things inside the Pentagon.
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So they don't order out as much, but in in preparation for this
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discussion, I'm looking up this thing.
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And so I do a search for they call it Pete's Int Pizza
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Intelligence. Would you believe there's a
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website? Check it out Pete's Int dot
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watch. We're currently at Docon 4.
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This is, you can see I'm looking at Domino's Pizza, Extreme Pizza
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District, Pizza Palace, We the Pizza Pizzato Pizza, Papa John's
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Pizza, all presumably located near the Pentagon.
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And there's a graph here and it's showing me, for example,
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Papa John's. There's a 300% spike in pizza
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orders right now. No, that's that, that that's
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'cause we're going to hit Iran any day now.
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Well, I, you would think so, except Pizzato pizza is down
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like, I don't know, 90% based on their normal orders this time of
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day, but these, these guys have got this all tracked out of the
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average orders by our time of day.
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And then they show you what's actually going on right now and
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that gives them their puts us at Docon. 4 I'm, I'm, I'm going to
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make this part of my daily ritual, so please do send me,
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please do send me the link to that 'cause I can't wait to
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start monitoring this nonsense to figure out when the next
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catastrophe is going to happen. This is one of these interesting
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things that pops up now and again.
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The the the one thing that sticks on my mind that was
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popular some years ago is some economists discovered that they
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can get a proxy for economic activity by with with satellites
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taking pictures, seeing how much light is being illuminated from
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from from countries. And the the theory being the
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more light that is being thrown off at night, the more economic
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activity is there. And of course, the famous,
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famous picture is of the Korean Peninsula.
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And you one of my all time favorite pictures.
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Yeah. It's like the North Korea is
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completely dark except for one spot that's within the capital,
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Pyongyang. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Other than that, it's completely dark.
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Meanwhile, South Korea lights everywhere all along the border
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or kind of out in the sea because of islands or ships or
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what have you. But interesting things like this
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you you wouldn't think of actually can throw off some.
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Useful information, Yeah, No, another pretty famous one is
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Waffle House and Natural Disasters.
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Yes, yes, right. That's that's fascinating.
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Waffle House is literally never close.
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Yeah, if a Waffle House they are, you know, something bad's
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happened. Something dreadful has happened,
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but and and more than that, you can actually pick up a phone and
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call Waffle House and say, how's it look out there?
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Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can use it in any
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number of ways. Another one like that is the Big
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Mac index, because one of the one of the hard things about
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measuring inflation is that the quality of goods change.
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A car today is not the same as a car in 1950, for example, But
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Big Mac is a Big Mac is a Big Mac, always has been, always
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will be, is everywhere on the planet.
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And so we can get an idea of the cost of living one place versus
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another simply by asking, what's a Big Mac cost?
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Yep, that's right. If I want to find out how much
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it costs to list in it to live in Istanbul, the Big Mac index
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is likely the very first thing I'm going to look at.
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Yeah, but anyway, I'm going to, I want to talk about something
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that you and I have never actually talked about, but that
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I'm guessing is bothering us both so much at this point that
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it it's time. And I'm talking about, for lack
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of a better word, the end shitification of Google Search.
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Have you stopped using Google Search yet?
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Now that you. Mention it.
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I stopped today. Yeah, I did.
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And it came in, it came in pieces because what I started
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doing was your, I would type in the thing, not in Google, but I
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always type it in the URL and it goes to the AI and I start, I've
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been using the AI And then finally I said, heck with that,
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I'll just use Chachi BT. Yeah, I, I was, I was doing the
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same thing and the AI was quite useful.
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But today I got a bunch of absolutely useless search
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results from AI from the from the Google AI, whatever the hell
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it's called, I can't remember. And I said no, this is not what
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I'm looking for because it just sent me links to web pages.
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I'm looking for an answer to this question from you colon
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question in quotation marks. A four year old could have
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figured out what I was asking for.
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Couldn't have answered but could have figured out what I was
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asking for and it sent me back the exact same links in as after
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I pressed enter and I said well all right let me Scroll down and
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see if any of this got into the the web search results for the
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space available on my my laptop screen.
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I had to scroll through one entire screens worth of
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sponsored content before I got the 1st result.
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So first it's AI doesn't work. When I tell it how to work, it
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tells me to go to hell and does the exact same thing.
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Then I Scroll down and I have to look at an entire page of
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sponsored content before I got anywhere.
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I figured, all right, I got to find a new search engine, and
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this is probably going to take a minute, but I went ahead and
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threw Bing in there just for the hell of it.
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And and I tend to have kind of an unpleasant disposition toward
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all things Microsoft and I don't particularly.
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For all things. I don't.
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I don't particularly like the idea of using Bing, and I can't
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yet speak to whether the search results it gives me are
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qualitative, qualitatively better, worse, or the same as
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Google. What I can tell you is I see the
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search results immediately and the AI integration on Bing,
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pretty good, pretty good. So I'm still using Gmail, I
8:08
still use YouTube. I have Google TV, but Alphabet
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just lost me as far as the search engine goes.
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And that's where they started. So well, see you later.
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It's interesting you, you talk about the sponsored links.
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That reminds me of something. I, I, I wasn't aware I was doing
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it and then became consciously aware of it.
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When I'm searching for something on Amazon, of course the
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sponsored stuff comes up first. I and I discovered that I've
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been skipping over the sponsor stuff completely.
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And I'm thinking, why am I doing that?
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And then it occurred to me, of course, because if the stuff
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were really good, it wouldn't have to be sponsored.
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It would show up top of the list because that's the thing that
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people always choose. So if you're sponsored, you're
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telling me that you actually aren't that good?
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Yeah, that's right. And, and look, people talk about
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Google's monopoly all the time. But.
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Within one second, I had eight different search engines I could
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have chosen from right? Right.
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Am I going to am I going to stick with Bing?
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No idea. DuckDuckGo makes a very
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persuasive case because now I'm not being tracked, but the
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results just don't seem to be quite as good.
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And, and there's a bunch of others.
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I'm going to check them all out and and Google, Google, Google
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can go straight to hell if you're making me angry as I'm
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trying to do my work. Right.
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I mean, look, if you're not making it better, you're making
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it worse, and Google's making it worse, so out they go.
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This is not a monopoly. Never was.
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I've got lots of choices. So do you.
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If you don't like Google, go find something else.
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Which of course, Oh, you've got more.
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No, I'm just going to say I I do find that AI is really, really
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good. Actually scarily good at finding
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things when I can't describe them.
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Well, let's scratch that. Finding things when I don't know
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the names. So yes, one time I was asking
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it, what's the movie with that guy who does the thing in the
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this and it. It shows me that it's got the
10:18
right answer just from my saying basically what I just said to
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you. Yeah, no.
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And and I find it gets me the right answer like 98% of the
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time and I'm not much to work on at all.
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Yeah, yeah. I I wish I could afford the pro
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version of chat GB TI cannot. So my my AI of choice is Grok,
10:39
which works pretty damn well actually I've heard.
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Grok is good. I've also heard our friend Clark
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uses Claude. He says Claude is quite good.
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I I had problems with Claude early on.
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I hear that they've all been fixed and it's a world better.
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I haven't. I haven't been back and I do
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believe Claude, see one of the problems, if you're not paying
10:59
for it, you get limitations. And if you have, if you have
11:03
limitations, you can't ask all the iterative questions you need
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to ask to get the answer you need to get right.
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You just at some point when you're almost there, when you
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when you type a question in ChatGPT will tell you to to
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check back in five hours when you're allowed to.
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Have. Another question and I yeah, I
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just can't do that. Grok.
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Grok lets you go no matter what, just keeps right on going.
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But but, and I, I have the foolishness of the week and and
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you heard me say that it was going to be about World War 2
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artillery. I I misspoke.
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It's about World War One artillery, but that's that is by
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any estimation. It's not about that at.
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All. Because and and we're talking
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about an, A roughly an 8 inch piece of artillery, if I had to
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guess, looking at at a picture of not the same piece of
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artillery for reasons that will become quite obvious in a
12:13
moment, but of a very similar piece of artillery.
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It looks like it might have, it might be 5 inches around.
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So it's 8 inches long. It's probably 5 inches around.
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And the incident in question comes from France, a country
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deeply involved in World War 1 is, you likely know, and why,
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why am I talking about World War One artillery and beating around
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the Bush the way I am? It's because a young man had to
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go to the hospital largely because of an injury from this
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artillery from World War One that he received when he
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inserted it into himself. Oh my God, why do you?
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Why do you have to talk about this?
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They had to evacuate the entire hospital except for that, except
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for that team of remarkably amused surgeons who were tasked
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with removing said piece of artillery from this young man's
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posterior. Oh, my God.
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So work with me here for a second, because this young man
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was wandering about and found a piece of artillery from World
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War One. And and he, he didn't say, oh,
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God, let's be worried. He didn't say we got to get this
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checked. He didn't say perhaps the museum
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would enjoy having this on display.
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No, no, no, no, no. What he said was I bet this will
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fit inside of me. Oh my God.
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And apparently the incident, as it has come to be known in my
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mind, they theorize, was part of a party.
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People actually have parties dedicated to this sort of thing
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do these. Parties necessarily include
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pieces of artillery? Or was that just a bonus?
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Yeah, I think that's just a bonus.
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It seems to involve and, and look, this is not my lifestyle
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and I'm I'm this is only conjecture.
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It seems to revolve around that omnipresent question.
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Do you think that'll fit? Oh my.
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God, like I said, man, this is the single greatest, most
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foolish, foolishness of the week we have ever had.
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I bet we are likely we're tired the foolishness now.
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And are likely to ever have this?
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None. Just where's the brown crown?
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And I would just leave it at that.
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I'm Anthony Davies, Co host of Words and Numbers.
15:32
James Harrigan and I are proud to be on Civil's Network because
15:35
we believe in their unifying principle of human respect,
15:38
which is the idea that our well-being as humans is
15:41
diminished when we employ coercion and that conversely,
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our happiness and prosperity are maximized when we cooperate.
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If you believe in our mission, join civil.com.
15:50
That's civl.com. Comedian, author and political
15:54
satirist Andrew Heaton joins us this week.
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Andrew is host of the podcast The Political Orphanage and the
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sci-fi deep dive podcast Alienating the Audience.
16:04
He's a frequent contributor to Reason TV and hosted the popular
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web series mostly weekly. And I still think he's a pretty
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nice guy. Andrew, welcome back to Words of
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Numbers. You complained the last time
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that we haven't had you on a long time.
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So now we get back-to-back Andrew.
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Perfect. OK, so the lesson learned here
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is complain more. All right?
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I I'll do it good right back. Works every time.
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Andrew, you, you said something that I've talked a lot about
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life today versus life in the past, but you said something
16:35
that I thought framed it beautifully.
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I've never heard before. You described, you said, what if
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1950s wasn't a time but a place? Yeah, so I, I got really
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interested in this two or three years ago.
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My parents are baby boomers and I've had conversations with them
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and some of their friends and there's, there's a, a nostalgia
16:56
there that I think is good on the emotional side and
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completely wrong on the economic side.
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So I would hear things like, you know, things were just cheaper
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in the 50s. It was easier.
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I had a conversation with a relative a few years ago where
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she went, we, we were driving around her hometown and she was
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kind of pointing out landmarks and, and she went, you know, we
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used to play in the park there when I was a kid.
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You couldn't do that anymore because, you know, kidnappings
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and whatnot. And I went, have you seen any
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data on that? Because I, I don't know that
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there's any, any actual statistics.
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She's like, no, we never heard about it.
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And I'm like, well, yeah, 'cause you were 8, like your parents
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weren't going to tell you about child murder.
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Like, like I, I grew up in the 80s and like, I wasn't worried
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about the real estate market cratering because I was 8 years
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old. And I, I think that a lot of the
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time what goes on, which is very understandable, is people are
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nostalgic about their childhoods for good reason.
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If you had a good childhood, you should be nostalgic about it.
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Your family was there, you were surrounded by love.
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You weren't worried about things.
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That's great. That's, that's beautiful.
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And I'm, I'm glad that you enjoyed that.
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But the good news is that while your childhood is over, stuff's
18:02
way better now. They're they're they're we
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could, we could make an argument that there are non quantifiable
18:09
things like maybe maybe your sense of belonging or your sense
18:13
of purpose like that. I'm, I'm open to that.
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But if we're just talking about how it was easier to buy a house
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and life was cheaper and people were paid more, that no, it's
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pretty much a slam dunk. And I, what I decided to do was
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when people tend to tackle the 50s, which really stands out in
18:29
the American mind, I think because that's when television
18:32
came out. And also just the aesthetics are
18:34
so cool. People really fixate on that.
18:36
We, we tend to look at it understandably as a period of
18:39
history. And So what I did on the
18:41
political orphanage, my show is I did an episode on what if the
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50s wasn't a time we could go back to what if it was an actual
18:48
place that's around right now. We're going to call it 50s land.
18:52
We're going to get on a plane, we're going to go to 50s land.
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And at the end of the episode, we're going to make a call on
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whether we want to stay in 50s land or come back home to now.
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And basically the Long story short is if, if 50s land were a
19:05
place and we were looking at the economic performance of 50s land
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versus today, and you had the ability to, to migrate there if
19:12
you wanted to, we would look at 50s land kind of how we looked
19:16
at the Eastern Bloc right when it came out of communism as
19:21
quaint white, having lots of lots of nice things about it,
19:26
nice people, you know, like, like good family, like all sorts
19:30
of good things. Not not putting the country
19:32
down, but in terms of who is a better economy for, for not just
19:36
the overall GDP, but the median person that it's, it's no
19:39
question that life is better now than it was in the 50s.
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Stuff is cheaper, we make more money.
19:44
There's there's one or two different realms that the 50s
19:48
has its beat on. But I would argue that when you
19:50
look at it, it's totality, it's it's rather overwhelming that
19:53
no, but it's not better in the 50s than it is now.
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You wouldn't want to live in 50s land.
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Yeah. And you point to television.
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I think that's part of the thing.
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We see. We see television and we assume.
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Oh, that's what the 50s were. Yeah, that's that's television.
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That's that's like assuming that, oh, well, in 2020, cops
20:12
live in, you know, high rises in downtown Manhattan.
20:16
No, that's in the movies. It doesn't actually work that
20:19
way. 100% Or like understanding New York economics at the turn
20:23
of the 20th century by watching Friends where they all live in
20:26
these beautiful. I lived in New York City for
20:29
five years and I did that tent, what, 15 years after it went off
20:33
the air and I lived in a converted dumb waiter where I, I
20:36
had to sell organs in order to pay for it.
20:38
And they're, they're living. No, that's beautiful.
20:41
Or, or like, alternately, you will find that a
20:43
disproportionate amount of sitcom characters are college
20:46
educated. Why is that?
20:48
It's because the writers that put them together went to
20:50
college. And so that's the, the world
20:51
view that they're inhabiting. Yeah.
20:54
I some of the things right off the bat that we can dispel from
20:56
the 50s are every, every you'll see these memes pop up
21:01
periodically that in, in the 1950s you had a AA1 earner
21:05
household and two cars and a vacation in a big house.
21:09
And no, the date is pretty subtle on that.
21:11
That is not the case. First of all, way more women
21:14
worked in the 50s than what we gather based on watching June
21:18
Cleaver. We're seeing a slice of 1950s
21:21
life that's really upper middle class, upper class white people.
21:25
But even within the overall average American, it was, I
21:29
don't have the numbers off the top of my head, the episodes
21:31
from a couple of years ago, but it's like maybe 40% of women
21:34
worked and it was very common to work.
21:37
And then you got married. Maybe you did part time work.
21:39
That was very common. It was not common to have two
21:42
cars. That was a luxury item.
21:44
If you had two cars, most families in the 50s had one car
21:48
and that car was way worse than what we have today.
21:50
Every car you can buy today is cheaper, more reliable, and more
21:54
comfortable than anything they had in the 1950s.
21:56
And then I I'm. With you on cars, I'm with you
21:59
on cars. I want to come come back to
22:00
that. But before we get too far away
22:02
from it, because people say this to me as well that well, you
22:05
know, it was 1 income household women didn't work back in the
22:08
day. And you know, of course you're
22:10
the numbers that you're quoting I've seen as well.
22:13
But you know, there was there were more women who weren't
22:15
working. Sorry, there were more women who
22:19
were the way I phrase it, they were working, they just weren't
22:23
being paid. Yes.
22:25
And So what were they doing? They were doing all sorts of
22:28
things during the day that we have machines that do now.
22:32
So women are working today just as much as they were in the
22:34
past. The difference is now they get
22:35
a. Paycheck I you know what I wish
22:38
I'd spoken to you before I put that episode together.
22:40
That's a really good point. No, absolutely true.
22:43
The amount of, of Labor done is lower that we have to do.
22:47
And on top of that, there's, there's some other statistical
22:49
things too, like when you get into the, the like in, in taxes,
22:54
we, we look at household income, we don't look at individuals,
22:57
right? That's, that's how we do most of
22:58
our statistics. So it's one of those things
23:01
where when you look at how, how households were doing in the 50s
23:04
in terms of purchasing parity power, occasionally you'll,
23:07
you'll find things that look like, yeah, the households were
23:09
doing better if you were 27 years old than they were now.
23:14
But part of that is also the fact that people are getting
23:16
married less frequently and later.
23:18
And so if you were to take the same amount of people that were
23:21
getting married in the 50s and they did have a higher rate of
23:23
marriage, the divorce rate was actually pretty similar.
23:26
The divorce rate spiked in the 80s, but it's back down to about
23:29
where it was in the 50's. The difference is people aren't
23:31
getting married as frequently or as early.
23:34
But if you were to take everybody like me that probably
23:37
would have been married by my age in the 50s and combine those
23:40
household incomes, you'd suddenly see the statistics
23:42
change again. So the, yeah, the the a lot of
23:45
that stuff is completely illusionary.
23:47
Where we're we're. Looking at a televised
23:50
simulacrum or an uneducated meme rather than the actual reality
23:56
of how much people were earning. Another example, food was way
23:59
more expensive in the 50s and, and this is an argument, you can
24:02
look at how much people were paying with inflation adjusted
24:06
income. And I realized that figuring out
24:08
inflation that it's a lot of art and a little bit of science.
24:11
But if you remove that and just look at how much did people
24:14
spend on food as a percentage of their income that was much
24:18
higher in the 50s than it is now.
24:20
And one of the reasons that you can you're one of the examples
24:23
you can see that is we eat out way more now than we did in the
24:27
19. Oh my gosh, because you couldn't
24:28
afford. To do it in the 1950s, you know,
24:30
maybe once a month you'd go out. I think the average was like in
24:33
the 50s, you would eat out maybe once a week.
24:35
The median, the median person would eat out maybe once a week.
24:38
And now it's like 1/4 of all meals are consumed out now.
24:40
That's probably including breakfast.
24:42
Maybe that's people getting, you know, like a, a, a, a breakfast
24:45
burrito or something on their way to work.
24:47
But, but, but people are able to afford to eat out so much more
24:51
now than they were back then. And then culturally, if you want
24:54
to get in a little bit more too, the food we have is better.
24:58
Like I'm, I'm from Oklahoma. I, I remember when sushi came to
25:01
Oklahoma, there were articles written about this Japanese food
25:05
with raw fish. And like, now I could get Kiwano
25:09
melon plu in a in a grocery store in Wagner, Oklahoma.
25:12
The variety that's available everywhere in the country's
25:14
better and cheaper. Yeah, and this is the thing, you
25:17
know, I I can remember as a kid and I noticed now I don't hear
25:20
it anymore, people saying something's in season.
25:24
Yeah, when I was a kid, you wanted watermelon.
25:26
You got it certain months of the year, other months.
25:28
So you're you don't get watermelon because it's not in
25:30
season. Not to say it's too expensive,
25:32
it doesn't exist. There's something else leaning
25:38
on the the the data that you're working with too, Especially
25:43
when it comes to marriage, home ownership, things like this.
25:48
We're living quite a lot longer than we did in the 50s.
25:52
Yeah. And in, in a portion of that
25:54
time that we live longer, we're being educated longer than we
25:59
were in, in the in the 1950s. So between the the the vast
26:05
expanse of your new lifespan and the time you spend in college,
26:11
look, that's going to skew the data every which way.
26:14
Yeah, all of that's true. And, and again, if we were
26:17
comparing 50s land as a contemporary country to the
26:19
United States, we would look at that and go, their life spans
26:23
are significantly cheaper or excuse me, significantly
26:25
smaller. We, we, we could say, and this
26:28
would be accurate, that the amount of money people spend on
26:33
medicine in 50s land is smaller than that which we pay.
26:36
The people are paying less a proportion of their income on
26:39
medicine over there in 50s land. That's true.
26:42
But also the quality of medicine you're getting in 50s land is
26:45
much worse. And in the 50s you've got very
26:48
rudimentary chemotherapy. That's very, but for the most
26:51
part you're getting antibiotics and X-rays.
26:53
That's it. And so like no one in America
26:56
would be traveling to 50s land for medical treatment today.
26:59
That would be insane. You would not do that even if it
27:01
were cheaper And, and you're, you're getting so much more that
27:06
we're, we're getting a far better deal with the quality of,
27:09
of healthcare and the variety of like, I'd be dead at least two
27:14
times over if I were born in the 50s just 'cause I had things
27:16
happen in childhood that, that I probably would have died from
27:19
that, that we now have that are, that are so much better.
27:22
Yeah, I, I, I would also not be alive, but there's a little more
27:28
to it too, right? Because not only is healthcare
27:32
not, let's call it suboptimal in 50s land, so is nutrition.
27:39
It's deeply suboptimal, right? And and literally all the things
27:44
that that pile into the one metric lifespan, they're all
27:49
suboptimal, yes. All of that's true where, where
27:53
I think like there are a few things that we could, we could
27:56
say about it. The housing was cheaper, but I
28:02
need to put in a couple of caveats there.
28:05
One, houses are larger now. People prefer larger houses than
28:09
they did. I went by the house my mom grew
28:10
up in and it was considerably smaller than the house I grew up
28:15
in, which is, you know, the kids all had bunk beds staying in one
28:17
room. My dad grew up in a 2 bedroom
28:19
house with three kids. That was very common back then.
28:22
Stuff that we would consider a deprivation today.
28:25
In most instances, we, we, we would view that as, you know,
28:28
kind of working class, you know, food on the table, but not
28:31
really, not really affluent. And you, you can argue that
28:36
that's better. I, I for one of a very big
28:38
proponent of having more varieties of housing and less
28:42
restrictions on housing. But there are there are a few
28:44
other things too. The the kind of starter home
28:47
idea that you could buy a cheap starter home.
28:50
You you can still do that. You do have to travel outside of
28:53
the periphery of the city in order to do it, but you can go
28:56
get like a, in effect, a, a house that is as cheap as the
28:59
50s if you want to get like modular housing and it would be
29:02
about the same size. And then the stuff that we, you
29:04
know, we are fighting in terms of rising housing costs are, are
29:07
all supply side. It's, it's because we've got,
29:10
you know, these laborious zoning restrictions that are going on.
29:13
There were a few other things they were dealing with that
29:15
we're not like they had rapid suburbanization, but we've
29:17
already kind of done the, the low hanging fruit on that where
29:21
we can build greater and greater suburbs, but the, the distance
29:24
to the core is going to be smaller.
29:25
So that was kind of a one time trick we could do of suddenly
29:28
expanding all that land. Now we got to build up rather
29:30
than out if we want to have that same kind of phenomenon.
29:33
I've done the, the, the math on housing.
29:35
I, I don't have figures going back to 1950, but I do have them
29:39
going to the mid 1980s. And the, the median house today
29:44
is twice the square footage of the median house in 1984,
29:48
double. And the average number of people
29:51
in the house is half. So, So on a per person basis,
29:56
per person, per square foot, you're getting four times the
29:59
amount of house as you are, as you were getting in 1984.
30:03
Plus, you know, then you got the HVAC, which James and I've
30:06
talked about this before. When I was a teenager, we got
30:09
our first air conditioner and we were not a poor household, but
30:13
that wasn't a thing. It didn't have, well, nobody had
30:16
the HVAC. It wasn't such, it didn't exist.
30:19
But, you know, very few people got air conditioning even we're
30:23
we're. On that note of like the
30:25
technological gizmos that are available to us were, were, were
30:28
we to go to 50s land and pull out our iPhones, it would be
30:32
insane. I, I went down a rabbit hole on
30:36
how much computing power would you need in order to have an
30:39
iPhone in 1950s and how much would it cost.
30:43
And what I ended up calculating was that if you wanted a
30:46
supercomputer, which is what everybody has in their pocket,
30:49
everybody has a supercomputer with the entire world's library
30:53
and millions and millions of hours of entertainment, not to
30:56
mention books and everything else you want to have that that
30:59
I carry in my pocket would require a building about the
31:02
same size as the Pentagon. That's just computers.
31:05
I'm not, I'm not working in heat ducts and things, just the raw
31:08
computing power. And to build it would require
31:11
the annual GDP of Canada to do that at that point.
31:14
So it's, it's great. It's an incredible amount.
31:17
And I like, I, I do appreciate like, you know, I'm 42, I don't
31:20
know the house and it's, it's hard for me to get to the point
31:22
where I'm going to be able to get one and live where I want to
31:24
live. It was easier back then, I think
31:26
if you were in a, a choice area to buy a home.
31:29
I think that's probably accurate.
31:31
I don't know that I don't know that the housing is as
31:34
restricted everywhere else in the country outside of kind of
31:36
the top 10 metropolitan cities. But one of the statistics that
31:39
really surprised me was that home ownership is, is actually
31:42
the same now as it was in the 50s, if not a little bit better.
31:44
And that's across age cohorts. Because what I thought was going
31:47
to happen is I thought that there was going to be more home
31:51
ownership today, but that's just because people are living longer
31:54
and older people are more apt to buy a home.
31:57
But, but even when I looked at people ages like 18 to 25, the
32:00
home ownership rates were about the same.
32:02
So it, it, it's not that there was this huge change in it, I
32:05
think, and I, I could be wrong because again, this is a couple
32:08
years ago, I think the percentage that people spend on
32:10
their houses has gone up. So the, the, the, the, the
32:13
allocation we spent on houses that has increased.
32:16
People can, I think rightly gripe about that and I would
32:18
urge you to focus those gripes on Nimbyism, which are the root
32:23
cause of why you're paying more for houses.
32:25
Yeah. And and that, that you're
32:27
absolutely correct about that. However, again, if you adjust on
32:30
a per square foot basis, it's actually come down housing is
32:34
1010 to 20% cheaper. But what's interesting is over
32:40
the course of roughly 1980 through 2020, price of housing
32:48
went steadily up, adjusted for inflation.
32:51
It's still, it's going steadily up, but mortgage rates were
32:54
coming steadily down. Oh, interesting.
32:56
And the result, the result was that for about a 30 year period,
33:02
the mortgage on a newly purchased house was in today's
33:06
dollars, $2000 a month. It was always $2000 a month
33:11
adjusted for inflation for 30 years.
33:14
What changed? What changed come 2021-2022?
33:18
It wasn't so. But yes, the housing prices did
33:20
rise faster, but that wasn't the big thing.
33:23
The big thing was the mortgage rates.
33:25
The mortgage rates went from 2% to almost 7%.
33:29
And that's what blew up. Over the course of like 2 years,
33:33
the mortgage on a newly purchased house doubled.
33:36
OK, interesting, interesting. I see.
33:38
I want to do anti. I want to do a follow up episode
33:42
sometime this year on was life cheaper in the 80s?
33:44
Because I was born in 84. And I, I will also acknowledge,
33:46
I don't know because I've not done the, the data on that.
33:50
But I, I wanted, I, I do want to go into like more recent memory
33:54
and I'm going to tuck that in my back pocket.
33:56
That's a really good thing, yeah.
33:57
Yeah, mid 80s were a really expensive time to live.
34:01
Yeah, well, it like one of the other things, this is true for
34:03
the 80s and for the 50s there's this idea that's promulgated
34:06
very much by the MAGA crowd that we don't make things in America
34:09
anymore. And if, if 50s land is a country
34:13
today, we have a bigger export economy than it does.
34:17
We, we export more stuff now. Now what's changed is twofold.
34:22
Yes, our proportion of the export economy has gone down
34:26
because Europe had been obliterated from World War 2.
34:29
So if you're just concerned that we're doing better than other
34:31
countries in the amount of stuff we sell, I guess.
34:33
But the reality is we we make and sell more stuff to
34:36
foreigners than we did in the 1950s.
34:39
And it would be lagging behind us if it were a contemporary
34:42
country. And then the other thing is it's
34:45
not that we quit making things, it's that we make more expensive
34:48
things. The stuff that America exports
34:50
is primarily computers, aviation stuff that involves a highly
34:54
skilled workforce. Whereas, yeah, in the 1950s we
34:56
were doing textile and we were making sandals and whatnot.
34:59
But today, if you were comparing, say, Indonesia to
35:02
Germany, both of which have exports of large export
35:04
economies, you, you would go, well, I'd much rather be the
35:07
German economy that's exporting high grade industrial
35:11
manufacturing equipment and making a buck off of it than
35:14
making sandals and, and little hats and Fanny packs and things.
35:17
So we, and same with the 80s, like you look at the 80s.
35:21
I, I do know this, that when you look like steel exports, like
35:23
we're, we're exporting now than we were in the 1980s.
35:26
It's not that we quit making stuff, it's that we became more
35:30
efficient at it. So there are less jobs in steel
35:32
manufacturing because we automated a lot of them.
35:34
But weirdly, people don't, they never think about this with
35:38
farmers. We talk about exports like the
35:40
in in 1900 about 80% I want to say of the the working
35:45
population was farmers. If we go back to 1880, it's like
35:47
9095% of the country. No one thinks that we don't have
35:51
farmers anymore because we we quit growing food.
35:55
The reason we have so few farmers is because they're
35:57
goddamn rocket scientists. My uncle's a farmer and Alice,
36:00
Oklahoma, he's a rocket scientist for wheat.
36:03
He is like PhD level agronomist. And all of the farmers that I
36:06
know and have met have crazy technology.
36:09
I was in Scotland a couple years ago and randomly was at
36:13
somebody's farm and they're like, oh, would you like to ride
36:15
it under the tractor? And I went, I would love to ride
36:18
in your tractor. We'll talk about short, short
36:21
red wheat versus what I'm used to in Oklahoma.
36:23
This will be good fodder with the family when I get back.
36:26
We got inside of the space shuttle that happens to have a
36:28
thresher on it and looked at the heat map he had of his farm on a
36:33
square footage basis where he could look and go, Yeah, that
36:37
part last year was about 8% less productive than the rest of it.
36:40
So I've been focusing on that like it's our farmers are so
36:43
unimaginably, insanely productive.
36:46
That IA guy from Oklahoma who's descended from farmers can talk
36:50
into a microphone for a living. It's a good thing that's a
36:52
positive development. I like affording food.
36:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Civil is on a mission to host
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37:21
Look. The hallmark, I think one of the
37:24
primary ones of a healthy, functional society is how much
37:29
food they throw away. Yeah.
37:31
Right. If you can scoop food into the
37:34
garbage out of your fridge and put it in the the bin outside,
37:38
you've got a pretty good life. Because I've been to places and
37:41
lived in places where nobody does that.
37:44
My my great grandmother who I I have a few handfuls of memory
37:49
from. She was born in 1889 and so she
37:52
was a full-fledged adult during the Great Depression and when we
37:54
when we would go visit Grandma Bickel.
37:57
Side note real quick on Grandma Bickel, I was talking to my dad
37:59
about Grandma Bickel Thanksgiving a couple years ago
38:01
and he went, oh, tough old bird. Grandma Bickel went blind, 92,
38:06
quit driving 94, died at 96 years old.
38:09
And I went, can we, can we go over the chronology real quick?
38:13
I grab a Bickle and he said, oh, you got to understand, you know,
38:16
she, she spent her whole life at Alva.
38:18
She do all the turds. So she just kind of knew how to
38:20
get to the grocery store. So apparently she would just
38:22
drive blind to the grocery store.
38:24
But yeah, we, we would go hang out with Grandma Bickle when we
38:27
were back in town. And she would she'd, you know,
38:30
make us these, these sumptuous grandmother feasts.
38:33
And then she would take the aluminum foil off of the the
38:36
casserole, wash it, dry it, fold it into a neat square and place
38:40
it in her cabinet along with a stack of other aluminum foil
38:43
next to a jar of rubber bands. Her her basement looked like a
38:49
prepper basement. And it wasn't that she thought
38:52
it should. She she came about the Great
38:54
Depression and you didn't want to waste anything and.
38:56
Today it makes. More sense for me to buy
38:58
disposable pens than it does for me to figure out how to, you
39:00
know, take the time to put it in the thing and let it.
39:02
It's just, yeah, we, we're doing better.
39:04
That's why. It it turns out that the Great
39:07
Depression, it was perfect training for hoarders.
39:11
Yeah, yeah. But but we had our own Grandma
39:14
Bickle in my house. She was known as Aunt Louise.
39:18
And Aunt Louise died at 100, was a fully formed adult during the
39:24
Great Depression. And she also went blind.
39:28
And she had this little Volkswagen that she used to
39:30
drive to work. What did she do for a living?
39:33
Fed old people at a retirement home.
39:36
She was in her 80s at the time and, and she was so blind that
39:40
she couldn't play cards anymore. And we had the cards with the
39:44
gigantic and, and I said, Aunt Louise, how is it that you drive
39:50
to work if you can't even see a playing card right in front of
39:54
your eyes? And she said, look, I just
39:56
concentrate on the yellow line. Yep.
40:01
On the note of cars, to go back to that, that's one of the other
40:04
things. So like when you look at the the
40:05
major household expenditures that people have, it's going to
40:07
be food, healthcare, transportation and education.
40:11
If you're carrying student loan debts, which we can talk about
40:13
in a minute, which which college was cheaper than, that's one of
40:16
the things they got going. But with cars Transportation
40:19
already mentioned that it was. The the 2.
40:22
Car household was an aberration. That was what the wealthy people
40:25
did, but for for everybody on the ground.
40:28
Cars were more expensive overall.
40:30
Now for people doing surface level analysis, they can look at
40:33
that and go, you know, when you adjust for inflation, cars were
40:36
cheaper in the 1950s than they were now.
40:39
And that's technically true, but you need to factor in two other
40:41
considerations. Consideration 1 is the cars were
40:45
really crappy and they broke down constantly and you
40:48
generally had to get a new car every three or four years.
40:51
Whereas I, I have a 2018 Ford Explorer outside right now and I
40:55
think it's probably going to be the last combustion engine I
40:58
own. And I don't, I, I imagine it'll
41:00
probably go for another 5 or 10 years.
41:02
So we, we Bart, we buy cars less frequently because they're in
41:06
such better shape. So you're spending less money on
41:09
your car budget. And then on top of that,
41:12
gasoline is cheaper. Now.
41:14
That sounds crazy to people, but when you adjust for inflation,
41:16
gasoline is cheaper now than it was the 1950s.
41:19
So the overall amount of money you were spending on your car
41:21
was was was less than it was back then?
41:24
Yeah, not not just cheaper, but you're getting significantly
41:27
higher miles per gallon. Yes.
41:29
So the the cost to drive a mile is weight, which explains why
41:34
electric cars had such a hard time catching on in this country
41:38
because internal combustion engine cars are so cheap.
41:41
Yeah, well, and then I don't remember, we might have been
41:43
talking about this before we started recording, but the cars
41:46
were just really bad. And I, I will acknowledge they
41:48
looked cooler. I like the fins.
41:50
The aesthetics were great. I'm not militating against that.
41:53
But like, you know, you go, you, you watch Back to the Future and
41:57
everybody's waxing their car. That's kind of the trope of
42:00
cars. The 1950s.
42:01
You get the idea that people just really took care of their
42:03
stuff. No, what was the reason that
42:05
people were waxing the car in the 1950s is they hadn't yet
42:08
developed a, a rust proof exterior for automobiles.
42:12
And so you had to wax your car every week or it would rust.
42:16
And there are these stories you find where the floorboards would
42:20
rust out from other people's feet and they have to put
42:22
cardboard down like Fred Flintstone, like these, these
42:25
were crap. These these are like kind of, we
42:27
would now view them as like Soviet automobiles and nobody
42:30
would buy them except for, you know, very specific collectors
42:33
and things. But they overall way better now.
42:37
And he and I'm, I'm plenty old enough to have waxed cars in my
42:41
life. And it sucked.
42:43
Yeah. God almighty, it was back
42:46
breaking work. There was no thanks at all in
42:49
it. It was just something you kind
42:51
of had to do. But there there's another thing
42:54
that we should talk about if we're going to linger on cars
42:57
for a while. You're very, very unlikely to
43:00
die in one now. Yeah.
43:02
And, and Anthony, I have said this many times in front of many
43:05
audiences in our generation, none of us, there wasn't a
43:09
single one of us who didn't know somebody who died in a car
43:13
accident. Yeah.
43:14
Usually. Usually multiples present
43:17
generations. It's an aberration.
43:21
Statistical noise it it's astonishing the difference from.
43:25
That point it's they're way safer.
43:27
The, I mean, like you go back to the 50s, seatbelts were not
43:32
standard. For one thing.
43:33
They, they, they've been invented, but they weren't
43:35
standard. And, and yeah, you were driving
43:39
a death trap, which could absolutely get you some of the
43:42
things that we we could quibble on.
43:45
The minimum wage was higher in the 1950s when you adjusted for
43:48
inflation. I think that's for, for those of
43:50
us that don't like price controls, one of the, one of the
43:52
secrets we have that I don't broadcast is that the minimum
43:54
wage kind of takes care of itself because we're not
43:56
adjusting it for inflation. So it just drops down overtime,
43:59
but it, it was higher when adjusted for inflation.
44:02
But one of the other statistics you have to factor in is that
44:04
we've had large growth in employer benefits since the
44:08
1950s as well. In the 1950s, you just had, you
44:12
might have health insurance, but it's going to be pretty minimal
44:14
because again, we're talking about like antibiotics and
44:16
getting your arm broken. And you, you might have a
44:20
pension, which I would argue is much worse because if your
44:22
company goes out, you're done. Whereas today I control MY4O1K
44:26
that that wasn't invented until what, the 70s or the 80s?
44:29
But you did have pensions, you had a slightly higher minimum
44:33
wage, But now the amount of employer benefits that
44:36
accompanies wages in the United States is significantly higher.
44:39
It's one of the things that's left out when people look at
44:41
wages and wage decline of well, from the perspective of the
44:44
employer, they're spending way more money.
44:47
And when, when you look at wages, overall wages are better
44:50
now than they were in the 50s, People are earning more.
44:52
And that's, you know, I, I didn't get so granular as to
44:55
look at like the bottom 15%. But when you're looking at
44:58
median wages for normal people in the country, they are higher
45:01
now than they were in the 1950s. Yeah, adjusted for inflation
45:05
higher and and that's one of the things you people who talk about
45:09
wage stagnation getting. This comes around on Facebook
45:12
every once in a while to post this thing, take a look at it
45:16
because if they're saying the word wages, they're leaving out
45:19
the employer paid benefits. The term is compensation.
45:23
Look for compensation, yes. Good point.
45:26
I I will say they. I'd like to ask each of you a
45:29
question if I could, thinking about 1950s land we could go
45:35
visit. In your mind, what would be the
45:38
absolute best thing about it? I think the aesthetics would be
45:42
great. I do, I do like the aesthetics
45:45
of the 1950s. I like, I, I mean, I'm, I, I was
45:48
dressed like this before I came on.
45:49
For people that can't see me right now.
45:51
I'm, I'm, I'm dressed like a British game show host.
45:53
I'm, I'm wearing what's called a club jacket.
45:55
I look ridiculous. I just, I dress this way on my
45:57
own. I, I like the people put on
46:00
suits to go on planes, probably because only rich people flew in
46:03
the 1950s and, and I wouldn't be able to afford airfare back
46:05
then. And if you were rich, you put on
46:07
a suit. But OK, I think the aesthetics
46:09
would be good. I think they're, I, I think that
46:12
the two things that we could say about the 50s, well, I'll, I'll,
46:14
I'll do my litany of things they got us beat on and then the
46:17
stuff that I would like about it where I had to go back then.
46:19
So where they've got us beat, college was cheaper in the 50s.
46:23
You have the GI Bill and then independent of the GI Bill, just
46:26
the amount of tuition that was being charged was significantly
46:29
lower. Now I will argue that that is to
46:32
a great extent because college degrees are a positional good
46:36
and you cannot equalize positional goods.
46:39
If, if the, if the, the utility of the, the diploma is that you
46:44
have it and somebody else doesn't and that that marks you
46:47
as better as an employee than them.
46:49
You can't have everybody have a college degree and have it, have
46:52
the same economic utility to it that you used to have.
46:55
And in the 50s, I think they actually did have a much
46:57
healthier way of looking at college than we do because we, I
46:59
think starting around the 1980s, we decided everybody has to get
47:03
a college degree or you're an idiot.
47:04
And if you don't have a college degree, you just kind of failed.
47:06
And that's it. You just, you get to be you, you
47:09
sweep floors. You should have been smarter.
47:10
Sorry, which I think is a horribly classist way to
47:13
approach things. I think in the 50s they did have
47:14
a better way of looking at it, which was if you're really
47:17
smart, you go to college and you should be proud of that, but you
47:21
can also be smart and have a a high status job that didn't
47:23
involve college. My personal philosophy is I
47:26
think we should look at liberal arts degrees, of which I have a
47:28
recipient. The way we look at Latin, which
47:30
is if you speak Latin, that is impressive and you're probably
47:33
very intelligent and educated, but it would be fallacious to
47:36
look at somebody who doesn't speak Latin and go, well, you're
47:39
clearly a blithering idiot. So it was cheaper back then.
47:43
But I think it's also because only, I want to say like 2% of
47:47
the population had master's degrees, maybe 10% of the
47:49
population had a college degree where any college experience.
47:52
So they, they just beat on that. If you're worried about
47:56
inequality, the 50s is better than we were in terms of
47:59
inequality. And I think that's part of why
48:01
people you're in for the 50s, particularly older people, there
48:05
was also much less awareness of people that were doing better
48:08
than you. So in the 50s, you probably
48:11
lived in a neighborhood that was pretty similar in terms of
48:14
socioeconomic status and in terms of socioeconomic income.
48:18
We're also coming off of the tail end of World War 2 where
48:21
there'd been a price Control Board that suppressed wages.
48:23
And that's still, we're still seeing the lingering bring
48:25
effects of that. So people, you know, for
48:28
vacation, you'd go camping somewhere in your state and and
48:32
you know, you had a crappy car, everybody else had a crappy car.
48:35
Your house is about the same. So you didn't feel like you were
48:37
getting screwed. If you're worried about
48:39
inequality. So if you're bothered by
48:40
inequality, the 50s is more egalitarian.
48:42
It was also poorer. I'm not willing to make that
48:44
deal. But if you're willing to be
48:46
poor, provided that all your neighbors are equally poor, it's
48:48
got your beat there. Where where I think we could
48:51
give it some some credit is that there were there, there appear
48:57
to be based on the work of Robert Putnam and others.
48:59
There were stronger intermediate civil institutions at work in
49:03
the 50s. And that's a really mouthful way
49:06
of saying places that people hung out that weren't work or
49:10
home, that did seem to be stronger back then.
49:13
I think that the decline of that is almost entirely
49:15
technological. If we were to go back a little
49:17
bit further than that, most of the roads prior to Eisenhower in
49:21
the country were gravel. Me being a a Squire of Oklahoma,
49:25
I can tell you when you're driving down a gravel Rd. you
49:27
don't really want to do that at 60 miles an hour, particularly
49:30
in an old timey death trap. You want to do it at like 15
49:33
miles an hour. So you're going to just drive
49:35
real slowly through the neighborhood.
49:36
You're going to have the opportunity to see all of the
49:38
people that don't own air conditioning units that are
49:40
hanging out of their front porch.
49:42
And so yeah, you probably did have a, a, a more communal feel
49:44
back then and I would love to get back to that.
49:47
You also had television came real quick, like television like
49:52
came out what like 19501948 I think is when they become
49:56
commercially available and like 80% of the households in America
49:59
had them by 1956. But they weren't, you know, you
50:02
had like 3 stations you could watch and you, you, it's like.
50:08
Up to 11:00 at. Night I was been saying that
50:10
it's the Pledge of Allegiance that it's static so as a result
50:13
people you know when did mini golf or join the Elks Lodge or
50:16
the Rotary Club whatever it was in order to in order to to
50:19
entertain themselves and so in that capacity people might have
50:22
been less lonely. I think that that it's hard for
50:24
me to quantify that, but I think that that's a fair bet that that
50:27
people were less alienated and isolated.
50:30
But it's also worth pointing out that that atrophy we have is
50:34
precisely because we are more affluent and technological, and
50:38
maybe we need to work around that.
50:39
We need to come up with new institutions, all of which I'm
50:42
in favor of, but it's because we're wealthier that those
50:45
things happen, not despite them. Yeah, let me underline here,
50:49
people who are really concerned about this and yearn for that
50:54
lifestyle, you can have it. Just don't buy a television.
50:58
Go join the local, you know, there are plenty of local
51:00
organizations. You take the take the back roads
51:04
through town instead of the highway.
51:06
It'll take you longer, but you'll see your neighbors.
51:08
You can live that way now. But the fact that people choose
51:11
not to tells me that, you know, they're saying they want it, but
51:16
they actually don't. One of my good friends, Chris
51:18
Moody, he's a journalist who lives in North Carolina.
51:21
He and his wife are very conscientious about this.
51:23
And when they moved to North Carolina and they started a
51:26
family, they called the phone company and they went, we want
51:29
to install a landline and we want to get rid of the Internet.
51:32
And the phone company didn't understand what they were
51:34
talking about because they were, they don't have cell phone
51:36
reception where they are. So they have mobile phones.
51:38
They have smartphones, but they can't access them on Wi-Fi and
51:41
they can't get carrier signals. But they were very intentional.
51:44
They went, no, we want to have a landline so we can call people
51:47
from home. We can talk to our family, but
51:48
we don't want to have distractions.
51:51
So they they will watch movies and things, but they have to go
51:54
into town and download them and then decide what they're going
51:57
to watch. And they can't mess around on
51:59
their phone. And like, I applaud.
52:01
I think that's great. I think I think a lot of people
52:03
would actually be much happier if they do that.
52:04
But the reality is, you point out, and is that most people
52:06
don't want to do that. And it's, it's interesting
52:09
because the first thing that would make me happy about being
52:13
in 50s land is the silence, right?
52:16
Instead of being bombarded from every device in my house from
52:22
yet another message or ping or whatever.
52:27
Boy, it'd be nice to just have a break from that.
52:30
And then of course, the first thing I think is I'm sitting
52:34
here online right now looking at the two of you right now.
52:38
And as soon as we're done, I'm going to go outside.
52:40
I'm going to flip open my laptop and I'm going to turn on my TV
52:44
on my back porch, which gets to a a point, Andrew, that that you
52:48
made a minute ago. People don't sit on their front
52:53
porches anymore because now they have back porches.
52:56
Yeah, they, yeah, they, they sit in the back on purpose, right?
53:00
They, they don't want to see people.
53:03
And, and frankly, I do want to, to, to be online and fully
53:09
integrated. How do I know my revealed
53:12
preferences? What do I do every day I wake up
53:15
and I do that. I think I do it a lot less than
53:18
some people, but I still do it every day.
53:21
I don't think anybody would want to go back to 50s land.
53:26
I think there are all kinds of things there that we would find
53:29
charming and we would love to vacation there, right?
53:34
And because it sounds to me like 50s land, not unlike Portugal.
53:39
And when I went to Portugal, I was perfectly happy to be there,
53:44
right? Did did all of my devices work?
53:47
No, not by a long shot. No, No, they did not.
53:50
And that was fine. I found a cafe to go to and just
53:53
hang out. And so I, I think ultimately a
53:57
nice place to visit wouldn't want to live there.
54:00
And the most pernicious thing, I think, when we think about the
54:05
fetishization of the 1950s is the TV show Happy Days.
54:11
It it it is because it presented a vision of the 50s to a bunch
54:16
of people who never lived through it that had almost
54:19
nothing to do with regular life in the 50s.
54:23
Yeah. Well, and to to your point as
54:25
well, James, on the one hand we've we've I think had a
54:29
decline in social capital and interconnectiveness, but in
54:32
other capacities we're far more interconnected in a very
54:34
positive way, way more. I presently live in Alexandria,
54:37
VA on the outskirts of Washington, DC My family is in
54:40
Oklahoma. If I were living in 50s land and
54:44
they were apparently 50s land is a huge country that we just
54:47
discovered. But if, if we're living in 50s
54:48
land, I'm not going to first of all, I'm probably not going to
54:51
visit them every year for Christmas as it is now.
54:54
I can hop on a plane because I can afford the plane flight.
54:56
But I couldn't do that maybe every three or four years.
54:59
Maybe if I'm doing OK. And if I want to talk to him,
55:01
like not even that long ago, when I was growing up in the
55:03
80s, when my dad wanted to talk to my uncle in the same state in
55:07
Alva, they would, they would do a phone call like maybe twice a
55:11
year. That was a big deal because it
55:13
was expensive, long distance. And this is in the 80s.
55:16
In the 50s, if I wanted to talk to my parents weekly in in
55:21
Oklahoma from Washington, DC, where I wanted to do WhatsApp
55:24
text messages with my friends in Scotland or talk to my buddy
55:27
Jennings who lives in the Dallas area, that I would have to be a
55:30
Prince to have that kind of connectivity.
55:32
I would I would basically communicate with them through
55:34
letters and postcards. And I would have to have a
55:37
completely different social life that treated everybody else as a
55:41
memory that I could occasionally interact with in a very, very
55:44
indirect manner. Yeah, there was a one month lag
55:47
on international communications, right, Because it would take at
55:50
least two weeks for the letter to get to you and at least two
55:54
weeks for your response to get back.
55:57
Meanwhile, in 2010, I took a job in Iraq and I was able to
56:04
communicate with my family in real time by video over over
56:09
Skype at the time. Yeah, in a country that had
56:12
almost no infrastructure. Yeah, and like, I mean, like I
56:17
do that. I go I go camping in national
56:18
forests and if I'm going to get work done, I bring a star link
56:21
and I could be out in the middle of nowhere and get work done.
56:24
I mean, like, even when I graduated from College in at 7,
56:28
I, I, I went to Europe for the first time and I wanted to call
56:32
my dad for Father's Day. This is an OT 7 to call my dad
56:35
for Father's Day. I had to get one of those
56:37
ridiculous calling card things where you have to put in four
56:40
different combination codes. And I the phone I had that could
56:44
do it didn't have the right plug for France, but I happen to have
56:48
a wind up flashlight that had a plug on it.
56:51
So for me to call my dad, I had to plug it into the flashlight
56:54
and wind the handle like an old timey Edison phone.
56:57
And then while doing that, figure out how to use this
56:59
goddamn calling card and then talk to my dad for 20 minutes
57:02
like it's we're, we're waiting like now for free.
57:05
We can just talk to each other anywhere in the world.
57:07
You know, they're, you're talking about the nostalgia, the
57:10
TV programs and there's one that's worth mentioning, the
57:13
Honeymooners. That actually was the prototype.
57:17
I shouldn't say the prototype, but the Flintstones, the cartoon
57:20
was based on this. I guess you could call the
57:24
sitcom it was before the sitcoms.
57:26
But if you watch this show, The Honeymooners, which I believe is
57:31
set in the 30s slash 40s, you would look at this and think
57:36
this is this is about the depths of poverty.
57:40
They've got this grungy apartment that's basically 3
57:44
rooms, a bathroom, a bedroom, and the kitchen slash sitting
57:49
thing. And there's this grungy little
57:51
stove. This was a middle class family.
57:54
They were depicting a middle class.
57:56
Family. They were doing pretty well,
57:58
actually. Yeah, yeah.
58:00
Well, and like on on that note too.
58:02
So what what I did this episode on is, is life was life better
58:05
in the 50s? I I explicitly was looking at
58:07
economics. But you know, it's worth
58:09
pointing out too, that like, I definitely wouldn't want to be
58:12
gay or black in the 1950s, and I don't think I'd want to be a
58:15
woman, to be honest with you. I wouldn't want to be a woman
58:17
either. That's right.
58:18
Yeah, I, I feel like, again, if 50s land were around today, we
58:22
would be protesting it because half of it's an apartheid state.
58:25
And we would, we would be, we would be wildly and correctly
58:29
condemnatory of the the pink scare actively going on in the
58:33
country where where people are being hounded in the most
58:36
totalitarian moment of American history for being gay.
58:39
So like those are all very positive developments we've had.
58:43
And, and even if we waved them away with a magic wand, and
58:48
these are gigantic social issues right there that deserve each
58:52
deserve their own deep, long conversation, but if we could
58:56
just wipe them away, we still wouldn't want to go there.
59:00
Now, it would be really fun to visit in the same way that it's
59:03
fun to go to a charming, quaint place that part of the fun is
59:07
that you can't bring your iPhone that would it would be fun to
59:10
visit. And hope to God you don't have a
59:12
heart attack when you're there. Yeah, thank you for having me
59:16
back on. Yeah, thanks.
59:17
Thanks for coming. And given that you've just done
59:20
A2 for, for us, you've unlocked a, a a reward.
59:25
Do you have anything you'd like to publicize in any way?
59:29
I do so when I'm not moon moonlighting on this show.
59:33
I host the Political Orphanage and if you want a a more full
59:39
and funnier dive into the 1950s, there's an episode that I did on
59:44
the political orphanage called Was Life Better in the 50s?
59:47
It's about an hour and a half and it's me visiting this
59:50
country chain smoking an incredible amount, drinking
59:53
whiskey at banks at 9:00 AM. One point I kind of ruined a
59:57
marriage. It's very funny, but we get into
59:58
a lot of the stuff here. So that's Was life better in the
1:00:01
50s on the political orphanage? I like the idea of smoking all
1:00:04
the time, that sounds really good.
1:00:06
Yeah, it's kind of fun. You know, I was in Austria a few
1:00:08
years ago. They still smoke in airports, at
1:00:10
least they did when I was there. And I was like don't want to do
1:00:12
this regularly but kind of fun for a weekend.
1:00:14
When I lived in Iraq, I smoked in a grocery store.
1:00:19
Anyway, thanks for coming. And Andrew, it's always, and I
1:00:24
mean always, a pleasure. So thank you very much take.
1:00:26
Care of yourself and it won't be so long before we find you
1:00:30
again. I hope not good.
1:00:32
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