Ep. 83: Bread and circus and Punch

0:00Welcome back to Taste Land. I am Francis Zero. And I'm Daisy Alio Doe and I did not look a guest for this week. That's okay. You're not supposed to tell them that. You know, you can keep the keep the fourth wall up. We're prepared. Today we're talking to each other. Yeah. We needed to coach so why not do it on the record? It's been a while since we did one of these. I know. I think we did one right before the holidays. She feels like five years ago. So yeah, it was five years ago. We've had several weeks where everything decades happened since several weeks ago. This has really been a week where decades happen. We don't really need to get into the geopolitical events. I don't think that's what people come to Taste Land for. And I don't. Also, I'm really glad that Ryan at Garbage Day, he has a good take on monitoring the situation. I'm kind of done hearing that phrase. So

1:02monitoring situation. Kind of done monitoring, monitoring situation monitors. Wasn't it um, who will monitor the situation monitors? Reggie, if it wasn't he vibe coating some situation monitoring app a few weeks ago. I'm going to ask him about it. I think it uh, I think it broke. It was overwhelmed. Too many situations. No. I'll ask him about it. I'm actually talking to him tomorrow. Some of you need to stop monitoring the situation and situate, situate yourself in front of a monitor and get some work. Monitor your situation ship. Eyes on, eyes on your own home. I'm going to stop it there. Um, it starts in the home. It starts in the home situations. They start in the home. I myself have been in several situations in my own home this week. Today even is as late, lead as an hour ago. Did uh, was it the exterminator breaking into your house again? No, that hasn't happened in a while. I think I scared him sufficiently last time. Mm hmm. Realize that he was never

2:05going to exterminate you. Yeah. Um, anyways, okay, let's talk about something. So I have this in a while though. You haven't seen the mouse. Yeah, I know you guys were wondering about that. Yeah, mouse, mouse is, mouse is seeing you. I can tell you that. I actually think I repaired the hole that the mouse was coming through. I don't want to get myself too much credit, but I think do think I found how did you repair the hole that the mouse is coming with? Did you, did you um, with some spray foam? Oh, yeah. Yes. Anyways, I want to talk about Caper, the new food media company. I profiled them for creator spotlight published today as we record yesterday. As you listen to this listener, if you really, if you listen to this, the day it comes out. Um, I think most people do. I think most people can't wait and structure their week around it. I would agree. Mm hmm. Uh, no. Okay. Well, I want to start those, not just Caper, but a conversation I was having with Emma Orlow, one of the founding journalists, when I interviewed her last week. I think

3:06it was too much context and too little about Caper for that conversation. But we've brought this up before, although about a year ago, I remember when Eater, critic, Robert Cetema was laid off. Emma said, she was there for four years, and she said she remembers around five layoffs in the four years she was there. Um, and this was one of them, right? This was, this was December. That really spank your cortisol, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, this was getting layoff, mocked by your employer, layoff, mock getting logged. Um, I mean, everyone just shut that, everyone just shut this off. I'm using, it's not only are we using Gen Z slang, it's like stale from three weeks ago. It's not embarrassing you guys. Yeah. And, um, yeah. Well, anyways, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to topic mock you and keep this going. Uh, no. Okay. But we, we did talk about this a little over a year ago. Robert Cetema was laid off, and then I noticed, um, New York food influencer, food baby NY, he then got his first byline. It was like food babies, best slices of cake in New York City. And, you know, that seemed like no coincidence that in a food creator was

4:10getting a byline right as well. He's not the food baby. He's the dad. He's the dad of the food baby. One thing I'll say that, like, this is no shade to Mr. To Mike Chow, the food baby dad. I think that he does good service journalism work. He's at these new, these new restaurants as soon as they open, he's put something around. He's taking like detailed photos of the food. He's giving you the prices. Like it is useful service journalism. So the point I was trying to make to Emma when I was talking to her was that, um, maybe creators are becoming the main most crucial source of this sort of food world or, you know, restaurant service journalism. If these creators are going to go and they're going to take these detailed photos and have these carousels, they are doing service journalism for the audience as well as marketing service marketing work for the restaurants, right? Well, they're one half of the barbell rate. Mm hmm. Do you want to talk about the barbell? About the barbell. Yeah. Well, okay. So the barbell on one side, you have the independent creators. And on the other side, you have the institutions. And in the middle, this is

5:13how Max Cheyenne founder of co-founder of Caper, uh, pitched Caper to me, Capers in the middle of the barbell, right? Max just squatting the whole thing. Back to, I would show 40 pounds. The bar itself is 40 pounds, you know, so this is no lightweight. Yeah. So Ron found that out the hard way. So Ron did find out that out the hard way. Um, shoot, I mean, that's in the side, but we could talk about him's him. Marie Hill guy. Trump. No. Oh, so Marie Hill guy. What's up with Marie Hill? Trump of the of Marie Hill. Uh, Marie Hill guy. I mean, I might have, if anyone knows this, this guy's steel email me like, I think his deal is just like, what the hell is this guy's deal? He's kind of a hater. I mean, no, he is a hater. It's, I'm surprised Nick Ketu. She hasn't given him a column in GK. There's numbers that the account is run by multiple guys. It's some, it's weird like in Sully Jason, because like, it's kind of hard to be an insult in New York. You know what I mean? It's like, take that shit. That's your evolve style. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, he sucks. Um, he

6:15think he's a Zora and Hater and he encountered Zora and on a city bike and took a photo and just posted it and like, Zora and looks great. Um, so I don't know what he was hoping to achieve with that. So I thought that's what you were. But you were actually referencing the president of the United States. Yeah. Well, the, um, Trump to city, let's build. I thought that was great. Anyways, it was very clever. I also saw a TikTok that imagined how that was conceived amongst Zora's team, which felt a little too meta for me. And I know you and I wanted to get into the meta conversation happening around media that covers media and power right now. But do you how did you want to like, um, they put a point on what I was saying? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the point I wanted to make was that, you know, with creators kind of taking up this service journalism torch, I think it's a good thing in that it creates room and demand for this more serious journalism, you know, food, food journalism that's not necessarily about the food,

7:16but it's about the restaurants, the relationships, power dynamics, et cetera, the kind of thing that Kaper is doing. Um, I think this is not just like in food media, but as creators grow more sophisticated and produce a better offering, I think it creates a, I'm hoping this is like optimistic, right? It creates a greater demand across niches for more well-funded, well-researched journalism. That's a trend that was a Kaper represents that I'm hoping we see magnified in various industries more and more. I think it's because especially as people, as there's so much content to consume and in any given topic, people are consuming so much content all the time looking at their phone day in and day out, you inevitably become a pro-sumer consumer of whatever topics you're following, right? Like, this is why there's that whole thing of like, and Lee Sunberg wrote about this a while ago, right? About who? Maybe he was Rachel Carton. I don't know. One of the, one of the,

8:17one of these subsec stars, about people commenting on ads being like marketing, like the marketing girly slated this like, wow, marketing, okay? You know, like that's because people are spending so much time consuming marketing and they're becoming more fluent in, I mean, in parts of what KBS can show me their Casey Lewis. We just talked about the taste of that appearance. I think I am skeptical that increasing demand is as simple as increasing supply. I think it's a little bit more complicated. Well, I've never read Marx or Adam Smith, so I certainly wouldn't know. Well, but you're saying like that if you have increased supply of service journalism, you can increase the pro-sumer offering in proportion to that? No, necessarily. I think that these things are like related, but not correlation, not causation type of thing. Yeah, I think it all comes down to demand to pay for it. Like, I'm curious whether Max gave you any insight into what they're,

9:21what they're expecting to do in terms of their relationship with advertisers. He did. Yeah, he did. He, they are planning to work with advertisers. He didn't give me too much that's specific, but the way they're planning to monetize, one will be subscriptions, which he gave me a number that he asked me not to print because it's, they haven't, hadn't finalized it yet. There'll be these events, event series, which I think subscription, if you are a paid subscriber, if you are a paid subscriber, you will have the ability to buy tickets to these events, but I don't think that you, you will get, you may or may not get access just by dent of being a subscriber, but one example he gave me, he described it as eight mile meets top chef. It'll be, which is a cooking competition with New York city chefs in rooms that you wouldn't expect. Which, you know, sounds fun. I would take a place in Detroit. No, no, no, no, but,

10:22you know, there's that classic scene in eight mile that you see clipped in the memes where it's like M&M's throwing up in the bathroom, mom's spaghetti. Maybe that's just that music video. And it's like, the point is, I guess the point is he's implying it's some sort of like warehouse rate, but it's like top chef. You want me to speak on M&M? No, I think you should not speak on M&M. You think I should, why is that? I don't think that you have the expertise. I'm not. I think that I know. I'm putting backs. Then you do. I'm sure you do. What if we give Chet Hanks a cooking show? What if Chet Hanks learns how to cook Jamaican food? Do you think? I mean, I would like to see him cook an over easy egg. In fact, perhaps a whole diner breakfast to order. Well, we have to get him back into the country first. We have to get him back on the pod first. I'm monitoring the situation. I think I know. Okay, so it's that. There's a high low. There's a high low component of this.

11:22I mean, I guess I guess it's with the eight mile thing. I don't think it was necessarily about high low. I think it was just about like maybe the low might be the location. I think it was more, he said rooms you wouldn't expect. And then he said the G train on the G train. Subway takes meets cooking competition. No, God. This is going to come in handy when we all go to prison for our tweets. Well, it's a good thing. You might go to prison for your tweets. I'm horrible at tweeting. And I tweet like I tweet like I tweet like I'm 12 years old again posting on Facebook in like 2000. Big posting. Would you say you're vague posting? I would say I'm vague potting. But the final piece of the puzzle for the paper revenue, a structure that maxed it. Maxed it is going to be some professional products, business intelligence type of thing. He did not elaborate too much. I think they're still planning that even as we speak that's technically the the website's not launched. You're telling me a business made this intelligence? You tell me I'm not going to give a response to that. But that's yeah, that's really all I have

12:27to say. I don't know. I think it's cool. I'm probably going to do a paid subscription. It's exactly the kind of thing I want. I stopped reading eater around the time that they laid off. See, I used to read it every day. I would have put it up. And then it just kind of became uninteresting over time after that. So I don't know. I'm excited to read some while report. I've been reading the newsletters already. It's good stuff. Yeah. I mean, the last thing I read in eater was the big piece they did like what happened to the foodie. And that was kind of a while ago. So not great that I can't remember reading anything in eater recently. No, even like I used to like like every Monday morning, they would do some little thing like what are editors ate this weekend. And maybe they still do it. I don't know. I guess all the people I followed there just left. And Emma Orla was probably the last person who whose name I really followed there. No, it's dirt, dirt writer sometimes, right? Am I

13:29correct? I don't know if I had Jaya. I would love to have Jaya. Well, I, on characteristically, have been tracking restaurants that I want to eat at. This is very france people and maps of me. Well, because my birthday is coming up. And I gave your Pisces, aren't you? I gave banalists of restaurants that I was interested in. I don't know maybe of this. I also like need a new pair of boots. So we'll see what happens. And we have like some expenses coming up. But my list was no on N O W O N. Is it in Bershrik or is there one in Bershrik and one in the city? East Village, Korean fusion spot. You think there's two of them? There's one off the Jefferson L as well. That tracks. Have you been to the snail yet? No, I've not. The snail is on my list. Sticing house? Sticing house upstate. Yeah, not that far from me. Well, it's still like an hour drive for us.

14:31A harder reservation to get, but because we could go on like a weeknight or whatever, maybe not unattainable. And then this one I crossed off because my best friend wants to go there with me for my birthday, Iliona, Pizzeria that started on Peaks Island off of Portland. And they have a lobster pizza that I really want to try. And they have a new location like kind of in Park Slope. Sounds nice. Park Slope. Did I tell you I'm going New Orleans in May? You didn't. Why are you going? I'm going to New Orleans in May. My parents had some time share points that they were willing to share with us. And so I did like a city search for a few different places. New Orleans had like a lot of options. And it's been sobriety anniversary. It's 10-year sobriety anniversary. So we want to do something super special. So you want to go to New Orleans for that? Exactly. Anyway, if you could be sober in New Orleans, you can be sober anywhere as I try. Shyla Buff, not capable of being sober in New Orleans. Well, wait, wait, wait, but he is sober in New Orleans,

15:35right? This is the thing. Hi on. Do you think do you think he broke soap? Being short, I don't know. He did say he broke something. He broke something. He did say he did say that he thinks he has a small man complex. Yeah, I know. But you should go to Aviva. Go to when you're there. Go to Aviva. Okay. I'll tell you this off part two, but I'm going to go. I'm going to be there in a few weeks. I'm going to go to Aviva. Now this is like probably a bit of a tourist trap situation, but when we were there during COVID, I mean, tail end of COVID, the place that's famous for the bananas foster, do you remember what it's called? I think it's Napoleon House. It's one of the old, but I never went. I never went to any of the classic old spots when I was there. It's one of those things where I'm like, I'll go to that. It's like I've never been to like Keynes or Peter Luger's in New York, right? The classic steakhouse. I'll go to these places eventually, like I get it, you know. Yeah, that's real. It's like how I've never been to the Polar Bar. I've never been to the Polar Bar, and I've never read,

16:38I've not read Infinite Jess, but I've never read, no, the much more common Kurt Vonnegut, I've never read Kurt Vonnegut. I've never read Kurt Vonnegut. It's like I've never read Train Dreams. You've got to read Train Dreams. It's so good. No, but then we'll lose that thread on this podcast. As if we don't lose, as if we can't afford to lose another thread. Like, lose the thread, but we never lose the plot. Never lose the plot. And you, sounds like you have to choose between new boots or going to a nice dinner for your birthday. I probably don't. I hope you don't. I have to choose, because I don't think that my husband would say no to me, but I might force myself to choose based on my own sense of financial propriety. I bought this book a while ago that's been sitting on my bedside table called The Age of Choice. Have you heard of this? No. So it's The Age of Choice, a history of freedom in modern life. This was published last year. I also saw it on the, it was like on New York Times best books of

17:42the year list, taking readers from the 17th century to today. Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the choices. But I love freedom. Who will speak for me? Sophia Rosenfeld will, I think. But it's one of these, it's one of these heading on figures that I have stacked in the book. You're not an Age of Choice? No. It sounded like you just wanted. Not an Age of Choice in the abortion sense of an Age of Choice in the decision fatigue sense. Yeah, I'm, I've, I've often, a victim of decision fatigue. What's this dirt with essay contest? essay contest. Oh, yeah, we're doing essay contest with prison. So they are very cool publication, focused on like mental health broadly. And I was having a conversation with them about collaborating and I told them about the essay contest that we'd

18:43done with Lux and they came up with the theme of the correlation between wealth and health, but like, you know, in a very broad position. Well, health as well. Famously. Yes. Like how, how has your relationship with wealth changed? What is your relationship with wealth like? So I hope that we'll get some excellent essays and cultural criticism in addition to the adaptable Marxist Screeds. And I'm really excited to read through everything. I enjoyed reading through everything for the Lux contest in that. 200 entries for that. So yeah, so that was the, the sweating and the whale costume under the Texas sun essay. I don't know if you remember reading that about those Brittany Lightner's essay about her first job at SeaWorld when she was in high school and how that job allowed her to escape poverty essentially. And sounds like this one could also win

19:45this current contest. Yeah, there's, there's an interesting overlap. Like the first contest, the emphasis was sort of on work. This one's a little bit more, I guess, on the health side because of the way that we phrase the call out. And then Jillian Goodman's Making Babies piece about being on the commercial shoot for Baby Food also won. We had a winner and a runner up from that Lux contest. And the economic hardship reporting project was an additional partner. So I think it's a good way for us to like find new contributors. And it's really hard like, if I have submissions default open for dirt, I get overwhelmed by the amount that people are sending. I feel like contests are a good way for people to be tactical about what they send. And it's easier for me to review everything than just constantly be fielding stuff that's like really great. But maybe not for good fit for us. And then stuff that's clearly written by AI. Yeah, I, yeah, that is a good way to do it. I did, we published a few freelance pieces in

20:52Care Spotlight last summer. And I did like a very concentrated like, hey, we have this pitching window open for this long. And I still today have occasionally gotten like the last couple of months. It's like once or twice a month. I'll get one that is still titled Q3 2025 pitching window. Yeah, I'm excited to read. Welcome to my struggle. A total of the spot guys. Well, are you reading anything right now? No, I'm still kind of looking at the more. I have a huge backlog of values that I've been sent, like stuff that I'm really excited about and just like not getting there. I haven't been in reader mode. I've just been working. So sometimes I'm going through periods where I'm doing like a ton of editing. And I don't want to use that part of my brain anymore. And that's when I go TV mode. Then I go through long periods where I don't watch

21:54TV at all. We haven't even touched on the industry finale. And I'm only still like two or three episodes. So we'll get into it later. But I mean, maybe a couple episodes from now. I was watching industry and then I started this show on Apple TV. Have you heard of Palm Royale? Palm Royale is news to me. I like never heard of anyone talk about it. Classic Apple TV. Chris did wait. You know what? I do love an Apple TV. Those slow horses. Slow horses is great. We've talked about this before. I watched, I don't know if I'm caught up on slow horses. I have to check. I definitely watched like the first three seasons. It was like five or six. Yeah. I might have been, I might have stopped after four. I really liked the horses. The John Ham show was like fine. We got like four or five episodes in and maybe less probably four episodes in and then I never watched anymore. Yeah. That's that tracks. Severance obviously. And I watched the first season of Bad Sisters. So I can season. I was like,

22:55you know what? I get it. Speak. No, I want to see what you were going to do. What I was going to do. I was going to talk about what I'm reading very quickly, which is WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Oh, so you just asked me so you could talk about yourself. Is that so wrong? No, it's fine. I just think it's interesting. I talked a little bit, but when we had James on the other week, I was reading this book, Dogran by Samuel Delaney. So I finished that. That was really good. But reading Sebald after that, I was thinking last night as I was reading it, how it's, it's kind of like laptop, nonfiction, shout out to FOTP. I kind of can't believe I said that. Shout out to friend of the pod, Grito Reynbo. And that it's it's ostensibly about Sebald slash narrator, you know, bit of a bit of a blur there. No, no scarred walking around the eastern coast of England, but he'll get distracted in like the

23:56history of herring fishing, right? And in that way, specifically when I was reading that segment last night, I'm like, this is the kind of thing where I'm like sitting at my computer, thinking about what to write. And then I start writing something. I'm like, oh, herring, like, what's up with herring? Let me Google this and then like read four sources and then compile that into whatever essay I'm writing. So the other interesting thing about it is there's no paragraphs, like maybe there's some, but it's kind of hard to read when, you know, you've got two, just looking at two pages, and there's no, it's just like, there's no paragraph breaks. Anyways, it's an entertaining book, but after the very intensely idiosyncratic colorful stylings of Samuel Delaney's dog grin, it's a bit, it's a bit stayed. It's a bit vague. I would say, are you vague queuing? You're specific queuing. I'm vague queuing. Well, no, I just wanted to see if you had a chance to read Graspirons' piece about vague post-agenda.fi. I did. I did. You see it everywhere.

25:04I think it should have titled it, apparently. I think, no, I think you should have, what was it? What was it titled? Everybody knows, and then the subhead was like, but nobody wants to say or something like that. Yeah, so you should have had just that, and then the body should have been completely empty. It's very avant-garde. I actually speaking of avant-garde submitted something for the first time in a while to my friend Joshua Hebrons call for pieces about repetition, and he name checked Joe Braynard, some other of the... I remember repetition macsars. I don't know. I just wonder, it's interesting, because in some ways, it's easier than it's ever been to write a script for writing to do something more avant-garde, and I'm thinking about HTML review and some other projects like that, where it's the literature and code really colliding. I was talking about this weekend that the humanities and technology, this is the era of

26:07the true collision between humanities and technology, but people forget that the book is among the oldest technologies that some people would say, and so it's really not a competition between not technology and technology, it's actually a competition between one form of technology and another form of technology, and I thought if I could find a novel way to write about that, I would, but I'm probably just going to keep writing weird post-poms and submitting them, because I have to blow off steam. You've got to blow off steam somehow. What's up with the New York Review of Finance? Do I know what's up with it? Yes? My context to ask this in is that I saw... I have a voice note from Greta describing the scene at their launch party a few months ago, if you want me to play that for our audience. I don't know if that would be the best. Oh, we still haven't done it. You asked that episode. Oh, we did talk about doing that. I don't send voice notes. So listen, Daisy is a serial voice

27:08noteer. I'm not a voice note. I've been better lately. My texting style is 10 long, or 10, you know, short to long texts. I text as I think. It's easier for me to do that than in the system. I've actually been texting less lately. I'm down to like 15 people a day instead of 40. Texting less and going out more. Exactly. I'll have you know, I was at Charlene since until 3 a.m. this weekend. 3 a.m. this weekend, wow. Yeah, I'll text you next time. I will exclusively reveal I was still up and looking at my phone when I saw that we had gone to war with Iran. I was sitting at the bar early ins. Yeah. My friend came back from the bathroom. And I said, Hey, by the way, we bombed Iran. Yeah. Not great. And the vague posting thing though, yeah, it feels like a new trend, right? That you'll see, I guess what's really annoying is the I require context, Wojax, which I'll say

28:10somebody will post something on Twitter. And I won't necessarily get the reference. And I will go to the replies. I think they're more annoying. What are they referring to the real information? You're so right. Yeah. You should write something about that. I should I do. I need to blow off some steam and write something. That like our context guys, like kind of like being like, is there a doctor on the plane? And it's like some guy stands up and he's like, I'm not a doctor. It's like, okay. I'm an electrician. Okay. Well, see, actually, that's really helpful because then you've eliminated at least one person on the plane. No, I don't know. See, to me, it's really helpful. I don't think that you really think that. No, I don't. Okay. Let's talk about 25 years of iPod brand. I really enjoyed this. Another thing published in dirt quite recently. I think a few days ago we could go, but I like this line. I took up this line. It's hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had. In the late 1900s, one of these problems was the

29:13portability of one's music collection. The phrase late 1900s, my soul left my body when I read that. I was like, that can't be right. That can't be right. Have you seen these? There's like this meme trend I've seen on Instagram Reels where it's like, it'll be like a sports team. They're like, when were you born and they'll say like 19 and then they didn't they don't get to finish it because they go like, it's like the sound or something like that. I don't watch Reels, but I believe Matt there, but they're about for the curse of the devil. I've actually been dealing with it on going Instagram situation. I can't really post it. Wait, hold on. Let me watch it. It's really fun. It's really good. We had our quota for that. I can't really post on my Instagram story because it has all of my photos that I've given Instagram prohibition to use out of order. So if I add a photo, you don't give it permission for your whole photo roll. No, and I actually have a conspiracy that this is their way of trying to force me to do that.

30:13Probably. But I found some other people and read it as one does who are having the exact same problem. And I'm like, you know what? Maybe I need this. Maybe this is what I need right now for my Instagram to be kind of unusable. Yeah. No, I think that's that is what you need. I think that any sort of like that is really good. I'll tell you. I'll say this. So I've got my YouTube logged into our home television and Emma will use it to play like, you know, 10 hour relaxing music mix, something like this. And a few months ago, I said, oh, you know, it's kind of annoying, like my algorithm on the TV is ruined, which is the TV algorithm versus the phone versus the browser algorithm. They're all they're all different. It tunes them all differently. But I thought, you know, like sometimes I want to watch something on here and I have to like go search for it instead of it being fed here. But I was like in the middle of saying it. And I realized like, oh, I should be thankful that she has flooded my algorithm with these

31:15with like relaxation slop, right? This is so great that is not an avenue for YouTube to exploit me here. She's she's cut it off. It's actually great, great part of what have you been doing to relax recently? Getting in bed at like nine to to read for an hour and a half before you've been going to bed earlier. Yeah. And I've also been going to wake up earlier. I feel like I've just been working a lot and that that's like my yeah, it's like when people say lower your stress, it's like in what regard? What do you mean? I don't I rely on my stress. This is the stress is like how I well, I'm also like well stressed when I've worked so hard that I have fewer things to do. I okay, I remember my first job after college dishwasher prep cook getting in. And it was, you know, the end of when my first shift and I and I asked James our chef, I was like, is anything else for me to do? Or should I go home? You like left it means like there's always

32:19something else to do. And and that was when I truly entered the workforce and there's never there's never been less to do when you became a man in that moment. That's when I became a man. Yeah, yeah. Ben got to come home from work yesterday early because the heat and the building went out, but he had to finish working from home. How'd you can see him? Truly. I was like, they were all in their little coats like the IKEA monkey. Speaking of which, we haven't discussed the punch on this podcast yet, which is shocking. Just good. And I both cried about punch. I have to say I don't know what you're talking about. The monkey. The monkey. You've seen him everywhere. Oh, little stuffed monkey. Okay, I only know about this from from SNL. I did watch this. He bullied his making progress now with the rest of the monkeys. For some, I tried to tell Ben about punch. I started crying in the middle of my explanation and I couldn't really like get the words out

33:21and he was so confused, but it must have really affected him because like later we were like hanging out for bed and he like started tearing up and he was like, why would they show us that monkey? If he's so sad, it's really funny. It's also generated a lot of like really good meme material. Yeah, I think, well, I don't want to I don't want to speculate, but I think that they might have started a war to distract from punch because if we continue with that, I think that there was going to be an uprising. Yeah. Bread and circuses. Bread and circuses and monkeys. And monkeys. You know, monkeys often at circuses. So actually, that makes a lot of sense. Actually, not anymore. Not anymore. My nephew. When was the last circus you were at Daisy? Francis, I'm telling you within the last two weeks, I face time my best friend. I call her son

34:22my nephew. He is my nephew. I face time my best friend. Of course, my nephew wants to speak to me directly and she informs me that he's going to circus later in the day, but they don't have animals anymore because of like animal cruelty. But then I did receive a video of him at the circus and he looked like he was having a great time. So maybe no animals necessary. My mom also told me, I can pay this to my mom later. She said that she never took us to the circus, which is true. I did go to the circus, but it wasn't with my mom because when she went to the circus growing up, the sound of the whip that they used to tame the lions really scared her. And I wrote that detail down to you in a story because I thought that was very poetic. Poignant. Imagine being so affected by the sound of the lion's whip that you never take your children to the circus. It just echoes down the ages. That's the credible line. Yeah. Conrad and Mickey, if you're listening to this, you do not have my permission to use that

35:25season five of industry. That's, I mean, you know, that's kind of what train dreams is about. I wouldn't know. I haven't. Did you watch the movie, the adaptation? No, I have not. I've only watched one movie this year. No, I've watched two movies this year. I've only watched Frankenstein. I was like, wait, that's crazy. That's only March. But actually, like, you've only, I'm two months in, which is crazy because during the week of, like, of Christmas, seven day period, at the end of the last year, I watched 12 movies, brought to you by Letterbox. I, yeah, I watched that. And then I watched this awful movie from, I think 2011, a few weeks ago, Predators, which, you know, part of the predator franchise. But the reason I wanted to watch it is because the cast is like Adrian Brody, Walton Goggins, Tofer Grace, Danny Trejo. There's like, it was like all these names and it was sort of this, oh, why? This was part of session. You know what, they all needed money in 2000.

36:28They all need money. Walton Goggins, especially, it was like, what, what a, what an oddity it was to see him there. This was before same hairline, you about him. Actually, it was a little, his hair was a little, he had a slightly younger hairline, his hair was darker black and it was much shorter. And he kind of had this real, like, side show villain character. He's playing like an escape, the premise of this movie is that, like, it starts with Adrian Brody just plummeting out of the sky above a jungle. And very quickly, like, you know, all these other characters plummet out. And you learn that, like, oh, they're all in some way, like, these cold-hearted, cold-blooded killers, and they've been dropped here to be hunted by the predators. And Walton Goggins is, he's in his orange prison jumpsuit. He, in particular, has some really awful dialogue, but Brody is the star of this one. I mean, he's the star of anything he appears in, in my opinion, my humble hand. Including the Oscar speech one year ago. Wow. Yeah. I did love the brutalist,

37:34though. I've been thinking of rewatching it because Ben hasn't seen it. We've been, we've been going through a list of movies together that we all, we both want to see. We saw Demon lover. Never heard that. You should watch it. There's this great moment where Gina Grishon appears in an I love gossip shirt. And Gina, I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, you can list to a spoiler. Gina will be peering on this season of the desire question to talk about her new book. So season two, when the season two coming out end of March, probably will start releasing episodes, but we're recording now. Nice. Same host. Same host. What, how could we do the desire question without Laura? That's a great question. That's why I asked those team you up. She's the greatest. What did what an excuse you have to say about the 25 years of the iPod? Peace. Oh, okay. He's on his music card, Robby. Did he say music as a fashion?

38:36I say the lie that he might have. Well, so the piece was written by Molly Mario Bryan, who is such a good, funny writer. And she's written for dirt before. She wrote about, she was part of our pure moods package a couple years ago. And she also wrote about Imagine Dragons and this idea of rocked amism, which I love. She's great at like peppering in the personal anecdote. So the essay starts with her possibly a legal job at age 14 in the state of Vermont, using the proceeds to buy her first iPod. And just the way that the iPod shaped her relationship to music, where all of a sudden you could centralize it in one place, but it almost created more pressure for you to diversify your taste and make sure that like the spectrum of what you were collecting really represented who you were. And at the time, there wasn't really a way to

39:37externalize that. So it was still pretty private and a private listening experience. And we haven't really achieved that again. There's pieces of that that have carried over into music streaming culture. But the intimacy of the relationship with your own iPod and your own library, I think, has been lost to the ages. Certainly. I certainly have lost it. Interesting thing about my iPod is when I got an iPod, my older brother, said, I will just put my library on your iPod. I don't know how this conversation happened. Maybe he was like, I can get you started or whatever. So my iPod actually was not really my taste. It was my brother's taste. And I look back and I'm like, I never would have been like, I'm going

40:39to put Pearl Jam on here. I was like on the bus listening to Pearl Jam because that's like what my brother had. And like, who knows where he got it. I never even talked about it with him. It's a band I'd never never really got, never really listened to. And I don't even think I knew what I was listening to, but it's not like I had songs were like a dollar each at that point. I didn't really have a ton of money to be spending on music. So like the amount of music that I paid for to download over the course of having my iPod was always dwarfed with the music that my brother had seated onto my iPod. And so if you look, if I look back at my iPod and I might still have vestiges of that library somewhere within my Apple Music Library. I need to check. I'll check after this and let you know. It's such a weird representation. I don't feel like it really represents who I was at the time, but I also don't think that I understood

41:42myself or my taste in music at like a conscious level yet. Certainly. I certainly didn't know of that. If anything, it shows that I've always just been the type of person that will like ingest what is put in front of me culturally and somehow integrate it into what I like. So much of my wardrobe is still like a shirt that a friend gave me that doesn't fit them anymore or like a hand me down from my mom. And I think that like if anything, that's sort of like my my taste identity is integrating things that I have gotten more by chance than having sought them out. That makes that makes sense. I mean, I think of pivotal things in my life, pivotal pivotal books or music and so much of it did come from other people. It wasn't really until like with books, one of the most influential books for me as a child,

42:46the Red Wall series was really big for me and my friend's mom when I was a first grader gave me one for for my birthday and that became so influential on me for the next like 10 years into high school or with music. My now brother-in-law for my I don't know 12 to 13th birthday, something like that gave me like one terabyte external hard drive full of all his music. It was all the music that him and his friends had, you know, his 10 years older, that him and his friends had collected over the years and so that for a long time like similar to you was the bulk of my the vast bulk of my music library. It was so it was like 500 gigabytes of music. The most the most impactful piece of that was Simon and Garfunkel. I listened to there was like a bunch of Simon and Garfunkel on there and soon enough because I remember when I tuned to a track, often you listen to a thing like every Simon and Garfunkel song had over a hundred plays on it pretty quickly, huge for me. But yeah, I don't know that's that's how that's how taste is

43:52formed, right? Yeah, and it also makes you more conscious of the stuff that you definitely found and told everyone about like I know I'm more conscious of the musicians in my library or stuff in my wardrobe, brands, whatever where it's like I was the one that found that. There was no intermediary and that's like I think that's important too. I think that also tells you something that you feel is truly of yourself. I also like I feel like it comes a lot when people steal stuff from people that they dated. Like I saw a lot of stuff like taste wise from people that I dated. Well, you know what they say. I sold Jeff right away from my ex-boyfriend. I didn't know who Jeff really was. And now he was a huge fan of his music and now Jeff and I are like personal

44:53friends. My friends now. The taste the taste can't say it like the taste keeps the score. Sorry Joe. Sorry Joe, we'll end it there. Yeah sure. See you next week. This has been Taste Lead. Thank you.