PODCAST COPY On today's episode, my friend Randall Bock returns to The Lou Perez Podcast — or do I return to his podcast? Both really. As the good doctor describes our conversation: Growing Up As The World Lost Its Marbles Reflections on cities, family life, and institutional collapse As prelude to Christmas and looking back on the year, comedian and social analyst Lou Perez speaks with the ease of someone who has lived through several versions of adulthood. He talks first about how California flattened experience for him, stretched days into a pleasant sameness, and dissolved memory as quickly as it created it. "California is like an orgy of perfect weather with the occasional wildfire (!)" he says, and the line works because it carries both pleasure and warning. When he left, the place left him too. "I don't remember living in LA," Family life pulled everything back into focus. Marriage and children changed what space meant and altered what mattered. Apartments that once felt fine began to feel constraining, while a house with a yard suddenly felt necessary rather than aspirational. He describes watching his children move through space differently once they had room, and he frames that change as something obvious only in hindsight. COVID accelerated those realizations and stripped away illusions about urban life. Neighborhoods once marketed as communal began to feel regulatory, and neighbors who once ignored each other began to enforce rules by proxy. Leaving did not feel dramatic, and returning later did not feel restorative. The city no longer matched the memory, because time had moved on without sentiment. He talks about a favorite restaurant that closed after marking several stages of his adult life, and he describes paying the final check with clarity rather than grief. The moment mattered because it marked an ending, not because it demanded mourning. Institutions enter the frame because institutions shape daily life, especially when they fail. Universities, media, public health authorities, and police departments all appear not as villains but as systems that stumble when certainty replaces judgment. COVID exposed that weakness quickly. Policies enforced mask-wearing during maximal exertion and restricted physical spaces in ways that made no physiological sense, even to MD-professionals who understood the body well enough to know better. Doctors complied anyway, because enforcement rewarded obedience rather than reasoning. Perez uses humor to puncture abstraction. "You can't abolish prisons until the moment you want (some criminal) put in one," Reality resists theory, and fear reorganizes priorities without asking permission. Police body cameras' ironies: anti-police activists demanded cameras as a corrective; departments adopted them, yet: "Nothing has hurt the anti-police movement more than the very body cams they demanded police wear," Perez says. The recordings restore context; show why simplified morality tales fail. "For every bad police video, there are hundreds showing what officers deal with every day." Follow Dr. Randall Bock on Substack: https://randoctor.substack.com/ Instagram: / randoctor X: https://www.x.com/DrRandallBock Tik-Tok: / drrandallbock Find Dr. Randall Bock's articles at Brownstone: https://brownstone.org/author/randall... The Daily Sceptic: https://dailysceptic.org/author/randa... America Out Loud PULSE: https://www.americaoutloud.news/autho... Check out my book, That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: On the Death and Rebirth of Comedy https://amzn.to/3VhFa1r Watch my sketch comedy streaming on Red Coral Universe: https://redcoraluniverse.com/en/series/the-lou-perez-comedy-68501a2fd369683d0f2a2a88?loopData=true&ccId=675bc891f78f658f73eaa46d Rock XX-XY Athletics. You can get 20% off your purchase with promo code LOU20. https://www.xx-xyathletics.com/?sca_ref=7113152.ifIMaKpCG3ZfUHH4 Support me at www.substack.com/@louperez Join my newsletter www.TheLouPerez.com Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../the-lou-perez.../id1535032081 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2KAtC7eFS3NHWMZp2UgMVU Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/.../2b7d4d.../the-lou-perez-podcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb5trMQQvT077-L1roE0iZyAgT4dD4EtJ Lou Perez is a comedian, producer, and the author of THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE: ON THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF COMEDY. You may have seen him on Gutfeld! , FOX News Primetime, One Nation with Brian Kilmeade, and Open to Debate (with Michael Ian Black). Lou was the Head Writer and Producer of the Webby Award-winning comedy channel We the Internet TV. During his tenure at WTI, Lou made the kind of comedy that gets you put on lists and your words in the Wall Street Journal: "How I Became a 'Far-Right Radical.'" As a stand-up comedian, Lou has opened for Rob Schneider, Rich Vos, Jimmy Dore, Dave Smith, and toured the US and Canada with Scott Thompson. ...
Mehr anzeigen
Weniger anzeigen
Feb 20 202653 Min.