Mark Halperin

where there's a great service economy and people are super friendly.

But it's not as true.

There are good restaurants.

If you go to a dry cleaner or get in a taxi, they don't act like it's their very first day of business and they don't like their jobs, at least not as much as they did.

So I think that's the biggest change.

It's a more sophisticated city.

It's a more cosmopolitan city.

It's a city that caters more to consumers than it did when I was growing up.

There's a bunch, but the one I like the most is Daniel Ellsberg was a very close friend of my dad's.

And he came out to dinner with us one night, our favorite Chinese restaurant in Bethesda, and then we went elsewhere in the strip mall to the Baskin-Robbins.

And Dan, who, you know, had lived a very cosmopolitan life, acted like he'd never been to an ice cream parlor before.

gum ice cream.

And he's like, huh, could I order bubble gum ice cream?

What would that be like?

He had a lot of intellectual questions about the ice cream.

And that has always been a running joke in my family about how Daniel Ellsberg didn't really quickly understand the concept of the bubble gum ice cream.

yeah i wanted to be a lawyer i studied japanese in college japanese culture and society and japan was a very big thing then so i thought a lot of my family friends when i was growing up were lawyers at big dc firms so i thought i'd be either a diplomat uh with a law degree or a lawyer working on u.s japanese business stuff uh and that was true throughout college um my roommates were all on the um

Harvard Crimson, the newspaper, the Crimson.

And the Crimson is really demanding extracurricular activity.

And one of them literally flunked out of Harvard, which is hard to do because they try to not have people flunk out because he spent all his time writing newspaper stories.