No Stupid Questions - 103. Should Toilets Be Free?
Episode Date: June 12, 2022Why do Americans tip so much? What happened when Angie eliminated grading in a college course? And why did almost every pay toilet in the U.S.A. vanish between 1970 and 1980? ...
Transcript
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human beings are complicated little suckers i'm angela duckworth i'm stephen dubner and
you're listening to no stupid questions today on the show should you have to pay to use a public
bathroom urination hand hygiene tipping these are some of my very favorite topics in the world.
Stephen, we have a really long email actually from one Phil Mitchell.
Do you want to just read it really fast?
Do you have something to drink in a comfortable seat?
Go for it.
On a recent visit to Europe, where it is common to charge an entry fee to public washrooms,
my wife and I had a disagreement over whether this is a good idea.
She is from Europe.
I'm from Canada.
She's used to this practice and explains that it helps pay for the cleaning of the washrooms and helps keep the queues short.
Can I interrupt Phil and you for a second?
Yeah.
He immediately notes that she's from Europe and she's used to it and I'm not and I'm not. And therefore, she thinks it's a good idea and I don't. Isn't that just so interesting $1 fee. I elected to wait rather than plead my case to the attendant. So I argue that there are health risks associated with avoiding washroom use.
He's arguing with the attendant like I'm going to get a urinary tract infection if you don't let me in.
Although he lived to write the email. I guess it all ended well.
Yay, Phil.
Yay. I assume he was arguing with his wife.
That's the way to spend a European vacation right there.
The fee may also encourage public urination.
I don't know that Phil did that, but anyway, the fee may also encourage public urination
and reduce handwashing opportunities.
Furthermore, I might be inclined to stay longer to ensure I get the most for my money.
Wait, Phil, wait.
I'm so glad I'm not on vacation with Phil.
Phil, I love you.
I do.
But if you're making the argument that because you spend one euro or one dollar or one lira or one shekel to go to the bathroom, you're worried that I'm going to take a lot longer in there just
hanging out because I want to get my money's worth.
I'm not saying you're wrong, Phil.
I'm just saying you and I have a fundamental disagreement about whether we like to spend
our leisure time in public restrooms.
Okay, wait, there was one other final point.
Finally, if I'm dancing while trying to count coins.
Oh, because he has to pee so badly.
Right.
I don't think of that as a good experience.
And then this is how he ends his email.
In North America, when we want to ensure a clean, high quality washroom experience, we hire an attendant who works for Gratuities, collected after the fact.
We in North America in 1958.
Yeah, this sounds like a Mad Men thing.
I mean, they do still exist in some places.
And can I just say, I don't think anybody likes that.
Do you like having someone hang out in the bathroom when you go to the bathroom, Angie?
I would pay good money so that nobody had to do the job at all.
So can we agree that this is probably a pretty bad idea generally?
We can agree, yes.
But Phil wants it. Well, okay,
let me give Phil his due. He's almost done this email. So after saying that in North America,
we hire an attendant, we're not sure what century Phil's talking about, but that's what Phil's
saying. I might be inclined to be much more generous if I finished having a good experience
because I'm happy and relaxed. I wonder if the attendant
might end up earning more money,
but maybe I have more confidence
in human generosity than I should.
Is it better to ask for tips
or to charge compulsory fees?
Phil is a font of interesting observations
and questions.
There's so much to talk about here because he's asking about
tipping. He's asking about public goods, what should be free and what shouldn't be free. He's
asking about consumer behavior. He's asking about urination and hand hygiene. I have to say,
urination, hand hygiene, tipping, these are some of my very favorite topics in the world.
I think the most interesting thing here, and I'd like to begin with it, is tipping.
You've talked about tipping on Freakonomics, and we could debate the psychology of tipping.
And also, it is weird, right?
It's an odd tradition with both economic components and, like you said, psychological components,
because there are those who argue that once you are compelled to tip,
then it's not a tip. It's a fee or a price or a tax. We should say tipping is a much more common
thing in the US than most other places, including Europe. In fact, I think the one thing about
Americans that the average Parisian likes is that we tip. If you work in a French restaurant,
the Americans you typically despise, but they love the way Americans tip.
The psychology of tipping is very interesting. There is some research that suggests that when
people tip, they do so in part because it makes them feel like they're generous. So that argues for
tipping, by the way, because nobody feels generous when they're charged compulsory fee. You could say
it's like a Japanese kabuki play where we're all pretending, but still, I feel generous even when
there's those annoying defaults when you pay for anything these days, like handing you a bottle
of water. But like I tip usually 20 percent or more. I feel like I have signaled virtue to myself,
if not to the other person. And I think that is one of the reasons why, honestly, this social norm,
as bizarre as it is, has prevailed, at least in certain countries. When you're compelled to tip
for situations that typically were not tipping
circumstances, like you mentioned, I do it, but I don't feel virtuous. There I feel compelled.
Like Starbucks, you order a coffee, it's let's say $3. And I'm not sure if Starbucks per se does
this. Starbucks actually hasn't had tipping. They are just starting to because they're unionizing
tipping, they are just starting to because they're unionizing and they are demanding tipping.
So take a Starbucks proxy. And when you sign your little digital finger swish,
let's say there is a tipping menu for 15, 20, 25%. I do it always because there's social pressure.
There's someone standing there and you don't want to be the person that you feel they are going to grumble about and say, oh, God, that guy didn't tip.
And again, it's only a couple of dollars.
But when it's a compulsory tip like that in a situation that you're not used to.
And I think this is where Phil's getting to.
John List, the economist at the University of Chicago, who is a kind of friend of the
Freakonomics Radio Project.
at the University of Chicago, who is a kind of friend of the Freakonomics Radio Project.
John was chief economist at first Uber and then at Lyft, and he was heavily involved in creating the tipping programs at both those places. Originally, there was no tip. And then they
started to do it in certain circumstances as a randomized trial to measure what happens.
And what John and his colleagues found was that most people don't tip
in that circumstance. A very small share of Uber riders, I think it was 1%, tipped on every ride.
So if you think about one out of 100 say, that sounds nuts because in a restaurant,
probably 99.5 out of 100. And I think what that gets to is the importance of framing and the importance
of social norms. It is typical for tipping to happen in a restaurant.
Not just social norms, but signaling. I think the big reveal, as it were, when you do Uber
or Lyft tipping is that it's truly private. Nobody can see it. You're not even going to get
quote unquote credit for it. Nobody's going to say, what a nice guy that Stephen Dubner.
Part of it is the publicness of it, but part of it is just an understanding of the construct, which is most people know in America that when you go into a restaurant, there is at the end a tip.
And we've also been educated that that is how the servers get paid.
And now that is an incredibly problematic way to do things.
Let's say I own the restaurant.
I'm the employer.
I'm basically saying to you, the customer, here's what's going to happen.
I'm going to pay the people who prep and cook the food, but you're going to pay the people
who bring you the food.
That is kind of kooky.
And it's considered by many people to be discriminatory. The kinds of
people who get a lot more money for tips often have characteristics that are different from the
people who don't get as much. There are gender differences, there are racial differences,
there are age differences, and so on. So does that seem fair? Another thing is,
if people are essentially compelled to tip, let's say, 15 to 25 percent
on a restaurant bill, and theoretically that money is going to the people who serve you
the food, is that fair to the people in the kitchen who are cooking your food and are
just getting paid a set wage of, let's say, 15 bucks an hour?
But with tips, you might end up making $30 an hour.
wage of, let's say, 15 bucks an hour. But with tips, you might end up making $30 an hour. So that's what's led there to be a little bit of a revolution that I can't say has succeeded so much.
I was going to say very little.
But it's happening. There's one restaurateur in New York City named Danny Meyer.
His restaurant group is called Union Square Hospitality Group. They have a bunch of
restaurants in New York. Some of them are fairly well-known,
Union Square Cafe. I have to say, I love Danny Meyer. I read Setting the Table.
It's a really good book. It is so good. But keep going,
because I think his tipping innovation is so interesting as a case study.
Right. So really, his pitch is that what he does with these restaurants is not really about food.
It's about hospitality.
And some of them are very high-end restaurants, but they deliberately try to make customers feel unintimidated. By the way, in addition to these restaurants,
he also helped create Shake Shack, which is where the real money is.
That has definitely made a dent in the universe.
It has. And Shake Shack is now a global chain. With the core restaurants,
though, he realized a few things. One is relying on tipping as a means of paying your servers
is a little bit weird and wonky. As I said, it can distribute the gains in a very inequitable way.
The people in the kitchen were not getting tips.
Although many restaurants do pool tips and distribute them to the kitchen,
and then many restaurants also cheat their employees out of tips or all
different kinds of versions. But one really interesting labor market outcome was that a lot
of people were going to culinary schools to learn to be chefs, and they would get out with a whole
bunch of debt, and then they would be lucky enough to land a job in a good restaurant,
whole bunch of debt, and then they would be lucky enough to land a job in a good restaurant,
and they'd realize that they're going to be basically prepping the mirepoix for two hours at $14 an hour, while someone just like them would be waltzing in and being a server and earning
$40, $50, $60 an hour.
Or more. A server in a very busy, high-end restaurant $60 an hour. Or more.
A server in a very busy high-end restaurant could just make a ton of money.
You can.
And so what he found, what other restaurateurs found, was that it was really hard to find
good kitchen people because the best trained kitchen people would realize that they're
just not going to make a very good living.
And so he made an argument for what he called hospitality included, no tipping.
And it's been hard.
I think the reason is that people get used to systems.
We're used to tipping for some things and not to other things.
So, you know, when Phil is talking about his discomfort with paying for something that
he feels you shouldn't have to pay for. I totally get that because,
I mean, Angie, you know this probably better than 99.9% of the people in the world.
We are used to the things we're used to and the things that we're not used to seem a little foreign and intimidating and alienating. It can be really hard to change your habits.
So habits, you know, this is the way I've always done things. This is the way I've been brought up
to do things. That's an element of tipping. But I think in addition to the psychology of habit, there's a whole other
layer here. When Danny Meyer stopped doing the innovative practice of hospitality included,
they're going back to tipping. I think it's because when you try to change a practice that is prevailing in culture and you on your own are going to change what you do in your restaurant or your washroom, you're not only going against people's individual habits, but you're just trying to change one part of the ecosystem without changing the rest of the ecosystem.
And I want to give you an example.
So I have long wanted to teach my classes pass-fail
because I felt like my students
were too focused on the grades.
Also, I hate grading,
so I thought it was going to be win-win.
And I convinced the deans at my university
to let me teach a mandatory pass-fail class
that you can't even get a grade if you wanted to.
And I've been doing that for a few years.
And here is the result of this grand experiment.
I really don't think it works.
And it's not just because students have been in the habit
of getting grades and there's a social norm.
It's that I am not changing the ecosystem.
All of their other classes have grades.
And so when I'm
the one professor who says my class is pass fail, that means when you busy, tired, stressed out
undergraduate have a choice between doing the reading for my pass fail class or studying for
your graded classes, you are, of course, going to choose your graded classes. And so,
like Danny Meyer, I switched back. So you saw behavior change then among your students. You
saw less effort put in. I sort of christened the class and made it pass fail all at the same time.
So I can't compare to the same class with grading. But I'll just say that I was constantly
sending these babysitting emails to remind them the importance of reading and getting things in on time so that we didn't have to nag them.
I determined from that experience that this experiment doesn't really work.
And it's not because of the students and it's not because of me, really.
It's just because you cannot create your own microculture within a macroculture that hasn't changed.
It makes me think of, do you know that paper by Uri Ghanesi and Aldo Rustichini?
A Fine is a Price.
A Fine is a Price, yes.
I know that paper.
It's brilliant.
In Israel, these child daycare centers were having a hard time with parents picking up
their kids late.
So they decided to institute a fine of, I think it was roughly
$3 American per late pickup. And once that happened, the share of late pickups went
not down, but up. A lot.
Because the parents could just say, well, you know, now they're just charging me for something
that I want anyway, and I'll pay $3 and it just gets added onto the bill.
They were like, wow, that is an awesome rate for child care.
Yes, please.
So again, when you change the price of something, when you change the incentives, behavior changes.
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela break down the surprisingly interesting
history of public toilets in America.
Could be that I am the reason why there are no paid bathrooms in the United States anymore.
Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about tipping and public bathrooms,
let's hear some of your views on the subject.
We asked listeners to share their best and worst experiences with public restrooms.
Here's what you said.
Hi, this is Jennifer from Cleveland, Tennessee.
When I was a little girl, my mother would take me to the downtown department store,
and if we had to use the bathroom, it cost a dime to open the stall.
If she didn't have a dime, I was the lucky one that got to crawl under the door and let her in.
This is Natasha Gore.
As a frequent traveler and a woman who anticipates a line for the restroom,
I appreciate the airports that have been thoughtful in the design of the entry and exit pathways.
It's very frustrating to queue up in a tiny, tiny hallway that's both an entry and an exit.
Equally frustrating are buildings
that stick to the women's, men's binary
and have the same number of women's restrooms as men's,
even though those of us who can't go standing up
require more time in there,
so therefore should probably have more stalls.
In fact, some buildings, depending on how old they are, actually have more men's restrooms
than women's, hearkening back to a time when there were fewer women in office buildings and the like.
Needless to say, I've learned how to go quickly, and I've learned how to hold it if necessary.
My name's Mike, and my wife and I recently visited San Antonio, Texas, and we had
dinner at the Pearl's Supper Restaurant, which is adjacent to the Emma Hotel. The bathroom for the
restaurant is actually in the hotel, and if heaven had a toilet, it could only wish it was as nice as
the Emma Hotels is. We took a one-hour boat ride back to the Pearl on another day to, amongst other things, use that restroom.
If you ever have the opportunity, it's definitely worth a visit.
That was, respectively, Jennifer White, Natasha Gore, and Mike Krafinski.
Thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts.
Now, back to Stephen and Angela's response to a question sent in by a listener named Phil. frictionless. We're working on an episode right now for Economics Radio about public transit. And there are those who argue public transit should be free because it's the way that a place
functions. And don't you want to increase mobility? Now, whether it should be free or not,
one thing that everybody agrees on is that it should be easy to pay for it. But the fact is
that most public transit systems, unless you're very familiar with them, it's not very easy.
I literally cannot figure out how to take plug transportation in Philadelphia.
I just walk everywhere. I take Ubers when I need to.
And then if you have to go to the bathroom, you just pee on the street corner.
Exactly.
Speaking of peeing, I find there are two kinds of people in the world.
There are peeing in the shower people and not peeing in the shower people. Which are you?
I am definitely not a peeing in the shower people. Which are you? I am definitely not a peeing in the shower person.
I'm with you there.
Where there's a shower, because of the way plumbing works,
there's usually a toilet very close by.
Correct.
I'm a pretty lazy person, but even I'm not that lazy.
We don't have good data on peeing in the shower frequency,
but I am looking here at a survey,
and this is a survey asking people directly, so the numbers are probably higher.
62% of Americans
say they've peed in a shower.
What percent of Americans would you say
have peed in a swimming pool?
Well, okay, let's start easy. Peed in the ocean.
I think anybody who has been
in the ocean has peed in the ocean.
That's a pleasure. I know, it's great.
That's the reason you go to the beach, is to pee in the ocean. That's a pleasure. I know. It's great. That's the reason you go to the beach is to pee in the ocean.
But in a pool? That's terrible.
I will tell you that 36% of Americans, according to this YouGov survey,
have urinated in a swimming pool.
Oh, God. I swim every week and this is really disturbing.
Not anymore, you don't.
All right, let's get back to
Phil. So Phil was complaining about not having the money. And I agree with him that if you're
going to charge people for any activity, you should try to eliminate the friction. And so
these bathrooms that you have to have a coin of a certain denomination, I get why he objects to
that. Look, maybe this is a good business opportunity for Phil. Charge for
going to the bathroom, but reduce the friction. Maybe, oh, oh, this is a good mashup. Maybe
it could be a crypto potty company. I don't know what crypto really is, despite many attempts.
It's okay. Even crypto people don't know what crypto is, and that doesn't stop them.
The short answer is there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money flowing
into crypto investments, including by the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley.
Where that money will end up going and who will end up benefiting is a big open question
about which you can hear a lot more on Freakonomics Radio soon.
But if you did want to start a new firm, Phil, to take advantage of your frustration.
In fact, I think the name of your company is Crypto Potty, and I bet you could be worth
$5 billion by the end of the month. So you can have that idea, Phil. But in terms of
the actual problem here of having to pay to do something that your body requires,
I empathize with Phil's frustration because that just doesn't seem fair.
What would you say if I told you, however,
that America used to be a place
that had thousands and thousands of toilets
that charged you money to go to the bathroom?
Would you believe me or no?
There was a time in America's history
that there were public toilets
where you had to pay to go in?
Just like Europe. Yeah.
Certainly not in recent times.
What year were you born?
52 years ago, 1970.
So interestingly, 1970, in that very year, the U.S. had more than 50,000 pay toilets. By 1980,
there were almost none. That's according to a 2014 article I'm looking at in Pacific Standard. There were a pair of brothers in, I believe, Pennsylvania.
This is going to have something causal with my birth here in Philadelphia.
It could be.
Could be that I am the reason why there are no paid bathrooms in the United States anymore. But go on. Let's see. There were a pair of brothers named Ira and Michael Gessel. They were in high school and this was 1968. There were paid toilets. It
cost 10 cents each. And they decided that wasn't right. And they and some friends formed a group
called the Committee to End Paid Toilets in America or SEPTIA, which is a very good name.
They had a song. They had slogans. they had a newsletter. Now, there was already legislation
in different places proposed to get rid of this, but they brought a lot of attention to it.
They held a press conference in Chicago. And shortly thereafter, this was 1973,
Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago announced that he would remove pay toilets from the airports there.
The city of Chicago ended up getting rid of them overall,
and then state by state followed. That was pretty much the beginning of the end.
Now, what's interesting to me is there was one problem, which was that it required money to use
a bathroom and people didn't like that. And then there was a version of a solution, which was let's
eliminate the money, but the new solution didn't really happen. In other
words, if you're going to get rid of paid toilets, theoretically, you want to have...
You'd have free toilets.
If the governments around the country are the ones who are striking down what essentially was
a market for toilets, and they were saying, well, that's sort of a market failure. But they
introduced maybe an even bigger market failure because the governments are supposed to provide these now as a public good.
But in many places, as anyone who's ever been to a city walking around needing to use a
bathroom.
Like New York.
Yeah, like New York.
It hasn't worked.
So there's no toilets.
Right.
So you have few or bad public toilets and private toilets in restaurants and museums and so on that are theoretically inaccessible.
Although, you know, you learn your tricks.
Everyone's snuck in at a time in their life.
So if anything, I think Phil's email should encourage policymakers to think harder about creating a better middle ground.
You know, New York City has tried to create better and more abundant public toilets.
There's this big movement not long after I first moved here to install these self-cleaning public
pay toilets. Whatever happened with that? The first one opened in January 2008, and the New
York Times called it a 25-cent journey to the future. And there were supposed to be 20 of these automatic pay
toilets placed around the city. I guess this was phase one because 20 isn't that many toilets.
By the way, did you know that the US ranks close to last on the public toilet index,
which is the number of public toilets per capita? We have eight toilets per 100,000 people. We're tied with Botswana.
Iceland, by the way, is number one, if you ever need to pee, Phil. 56 toilets per 100,000
residents. So this New York plan to roll out all these automated self-cleaning toilets,
there were 20 that were supposed to be installed. The five of the 20 that were installed are still
in use, I believe, but the 15 others, which the city bought, were never actually even installed. The five of the 20 that were installed are still in use, I believe. But the 15 others,
which the city bought, were never actually even installed. And apparently they're still
in a warehouse in Queens. This is according to the news website Gothamist.
Why?
I think it's because the incentives are misaligned here, which is that,
as Phil noted, and as the Septia people noted, they wanted to get rid of one problem, but
then the incentives weren't really strong enough to create a solution in the other direction.
You know, when people wanted to get rid of public toilets, there was a lot of pressure
from other groups.
There were feminist organizations who said it's not fair.
There were student activists who said it wasn't fair.
And so to me, I don't mean to be cynical about this,
but it's a little bit of an example of how well-intended social justice can both work
and not work. So it worked in that they got rid of the pay toilets, but it sort of backfired in
that the availability of good public toilets has not come about. So I just want to understand.
It sounds like there was phase one.
There was supposed to be phase two.
Nobody thought New York would be served by 20 toilets in total.
So it was a pilot.
But they didn't even finish the pilot.
They only got through five of the 20 because the program seemed like it wasn't going to work.
So they didn't need to even deploy the remaining 15 or what?
I don't think that's why, but I don't know why.
My guess would be that in a place like New York, it can be complicated to do things and
there's a change in administration or there's a crisis and it gets on somebody's back burner
and it just doesn't happen.
I can imagine turning this problem that Phil had entirely on its head and think about places
turning this problem that Phil had entirely on its head and think about places where there's really very little in the way of good public toilets and where there's therefore a lot of
defecation and urination in the open. And that's a huge health hazard. So in a case like that,
we should probably flip it and pay people to use the bathroom. two Pennsylvanians who said, this is a violation of our civil liberties that we have to pay for
a bathroom. Let's eradicate all of them. I don't know that they would have been able to predict
that nobody would be replacing them with free ones. So it just speaks to basically trying stuff
out, seeing what happens, and then trying again. I think after New York's failed experiment with
those paid toilets, maybe policymakers needed to say, OK, now what do we do?
Maybe there could have been something else. extravagant issue that the next time they go to Europe, that she buys him a pouch and a lanyard
that he can hang around his neck and it just becomes his little potty fund. And so he doesn't
have to dance around trying to dig out coins and he can just pee in peace. I think that would
improve Phil's life and maybe yours and mine, Angie, too. I think that's an excellent suggestion from my reading of Phil's quite elaborate email.
I'm guessing that a lanyard with some pocket change is not quite what he will consider a satisfying response, Stephen, but it is worth piloting.
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. Before we
move on to the fact check, we'd like to give listener Phil the last word. Thank you for
answering my question. I enjoyed your reactions to my ridiculous story. My wife and I couldn't
stop laughing. I hope I can count on both of you to be early investors in my crypto potty venture.
Also, I do love to visit Iceland, where I've never had to pay to use a
washroom. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show,
Stephen says he thinks that 99.5% of people tip at restaurants. But according to a 2021 survey
by creditcards.com, only 75% of respondents said that they always tip at full-service restaurants.
Then, Stephen and Angela expressed their horror at individuals who pee in the shower.
As a New Yorker, I would be remiss if I didn't cite perhaps the world's most infamous shower urinator,
Seinfeld's George Costanza, who said, quote,
Later, Stephen says that Ira and Michael Gessel,
the duo who founded the Committee to End Paid Toilets in America,
were from Pennsylvania.
The brothers were actually from Dayton, Ohio,
but they were inspired to become activists
based on their experience with pay toilets
stationed along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Also, Stevens says that the United States ranks close to the bottom of the World Public Toilet Index,
a tool created by the bathroom supply company QS Supplies
to measure the number of public toilets per 100,000 people in a given country.
It's true that the U.S. is tied with Botswana with eight toilets per 100,000 people.
But we're actually sort of middle of the road
when it comes to the 84 countries included in the index.
Some of the countries that rank lowest on the list,
with one public toilet per 100,000 people,
include Uganda, Cuba, Turkey, and Cambodia.
Finally, Stephen and Angela wonder why New York City's
self-cleaning public pay toilet initiative
paused after only five of
the pods were installed. According to the website Gothamist, the Department of Transportation claims
that the majority of toilet sites proposed were not feasible due to either lack of community support
or location restrictions, such as lack of access to a sewer or available sidewalk space.
That's it for the Fact Check.
a sewer or available sidewalk space. That's it for the Fact Check.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss Occam's razor and the human love of simplicity. Why have we evolved to look for single causes as opposed to multiple
causes if the world really does work in a multiple cause way. That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
For that episode, we want to hear about a time
when complexity snuck up and bit you.
What's something you thought would be simple
that turned out to be anything but?
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to nsq at freakonomics.com
with the subject line, not so simple.
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I bet you eat or drink in the shower.
Yes. And what in particular?
A nice plate of cacio e pepe. No, it's fruit. It tastes
better to me. Try it. It's much better than peeing in the shower. The Freakonomics Radio Network,
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