Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Thank you all for joining us on this Friday, September the 12th. And because it is Friday,

we are back from our hiatus and back to Happy Hour. We're going to do our Happy Hour episode, which is Economics on Tap. And joining me for Happy Hour is a special guest and a good friend of mine, Laura Blessing. She's a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. Laura, welcome to the show.

Hey, great to be here with you.

Later on, we're going to get to what is happening with Congress, which is Laura's area of expertise and how what's going on with the federal funding fight is, or we're going to keep

the government funded and open and we're going to have another partial shutdown. We're going to

get to it in a minute. But more importantly, we must get to the drinks. So Laura and I last weekend went out with

my Uncle David and some other friends of ours to gather pawpaws, which are a fruit that's

indigenous to the United States, particularly the eastern United States, but they're really hard

to cultivate. And so you kind of either have to get them from the farmer's market or you have to

know somebody who has access to a paw paw patch, which my uncle David does. So we went, as the

song goes, way down yonder to the paw paw patch and harvested a ton, and then we both decided to make

some paw-paw-themed cocktails. Laura, I saw you set some photos of your experiments yesterday,

but what did you land on? I mean, that was a lot of restraint on my part. I love being a mixologist.

So it may not surprise you that I've got a bourbon one in my hand because you know me.

I figured that's what you'd go with.

Yeah, I think you saw that coming.

So I made a pawpaw version of a bourbon peach smash and put pawpaws in there instead of peaches. And of course, it has to have a

garnish because we eat with our eyes first, or drink in this case. And it's me, so it's probably

fairly spirit forward. But happy to talk about the other one, too, if you want. Yeah, tell everybody about the other one that you made while you were trying things out.

Sure. Well, honestly, I'd love to just be at a bar and order either of these just to see the look on the bartender's face because a bourbon pawpaw smash sounds like something out of a comic book.

And the other one I've decided that I'm calling a Kentucky 75 because it's a riff on a French 75,

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