Randall Bock: Growing Up as the World Lost Its Marbles
KEY MOMENTS
0:00 – Preview: Brooklyn memories and a restaurant closing
1:38 – Intro: Dr. Randall Bock welcomes Lou Perez
2:20 – The shortest day of the year and pre-nostalgia
4:45 – California weather and forgetting life in LA
6:15 – Loft living and moving to the suburbs
8:11 – Leaving Brooklyn Heights for New Jersey
9:28 – Saying goodbye to Colony on Atlantic Avenue
11:28 – You can't go home again: growing up in the Bronx
13:32 – Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and the New Journalism
15:17 – The Bonfire of the Vanities and Al Sharpton
18:46 – Nicholas Christakis and the Yale Halloween controversy
23:31 – Diversity and self-segregation at the Ivy League
26:55 – Questions about Oliver Sacks' case studies
31:34 – Turning nonfiction into fiction and Good Will Hunting
34:59 – Squash in masks during COVID
38:01 – Bumper stickers, vanity plates, and Tesla vandalism
42:39 – Lou on co-hosting Happy Hour Econ with Phil Magness
44:59 – Daniel Klein's book club and Cicero's On Duties
48:59 – Prison abolitionists and thwarted bomb plots
52:11 – Making a living in comedy and plans for 2026
53:11 – Lou's Pirate Wires piece on police body cams
57:10 – Body cam cases that changed the story
59:16 – Heather Mac Donald and wrap-up
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Randall Bock returns to The Lou Perez Podcast (or does Lou return to his? Both, really) to talk about growing up as the world lost its marbles: cities, family life, and institutional collapse.
We also get into California as "an orgy of perfect weather with the occasional wildfire," not remembering living in LA, why a house with a yard stopped being aspirational, COVID neighbors enforcing rules by proxy, paying the final check at a favorite restaurant before it closed, doctors who enforced mask rules they knew made no sense, why you can't abolish prisons until you want someone put in one, and how nothing has hurt the anti-police movement more than the body cams it demanded.