Alison Roman Answers Your Hard Questions

0:00I have made your chicken with lemon and dates from Nothing fancy more than any other dish in my entire life. and it turns out so well every single time. And, you know, I'm the sort of person, I cook for people maybe six or eight times a year, okay? I watch everything you do on YouTube. I love watching people cook on YouTube, but when it comes to me doing it, it's like six or eight times a year. So when I make your chicken with lemonade dates and I hand it to people, they actually look scared because they think, you don't know how to do this. Like, I know you. We're nervous. Yeah. What is this sorcery?

0:31Yeah, what is this sorcery that you're doing? And I say, it's the chicken with lemon and dates from Nothing Fancy. I'm so proud of you. And, like, I'm so glad that of your six to eight times a year, I get to be a large person. That is highly flattering. And Allison, I used to do a lot more cooking and cooked a lot of your recipes more than six or eight times a year. And then I had a toddler. And so now I just eat, like, half-eaten dino nuggets. Are they a good eater? You know, he's a very good eater as long as the food is beige or beige-adjacent. and as long as it doesn't include any vegetables.

1:05So if you have like a cookbook idea coming out with like where it's like only beige food and no vegetables, you would be huge with him. I actually have written about that. I made a thing called dilly bean stew with frizzled onions or whatever. And at the time when I made it, I was like, God, this is ugly. Like, God, this is beige. Is this the most beige thing you've ever seen? Now I'm sort of like, beige is beautiful. You know, monochrome browns are in and I love that. Well, I'm going to tell my two-year-old that he's on the frontier of culinary excellence. Yeah, so you're very lucky to live with such a forward thinker.

1:48I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, food writer, YouTuber, and podcaster Alison Roman joins us to answer your hardest questions about tech. And that's it. That's the whole show. So we hope you like it.

2:15Oh, Kevin, do we have something special for the listeners today? We do. You know, I abuse something called podcaster's privilege. Are you aware of podcaster's privilege? No, what is that? Podcaster's privilege is where you can just reach out to the coolest people in the world and say, I have a podcast. Will you please come on it? And we actually did that this week. Yeah. Who have you tried this with? Like the Pope, Dalai Lama? How's this working? Yeah, we tried to get the Pope on here, but then he made all those slurs about gay people. And I said, maybe we'll try him another month when he calmed down a little bit.

2:48But no, what we did this week, Kevin, was we reached out to Alison Roman. and something about me is that on YouTube, I will watch any human cook any dish. I don't know what it is. I love watching people make food. I make food occasionally, but not all that often relative to how much YouTube I watch. And there is nobody better at cooking on YouTube than Alison Roman. And I should say, it's not just YouTube. She's also a chef and a food writer. She is known for some of her viral recipes like the stew and the cookies and some best-selling cookbooks, including My Favorite, Nothing Fancy, and more recently, Sweet Enough.

3:28She kind of has a finger in just about everything. Yeah, and I think most relevant to us is that Allison is what I would consider kind of like a very online person. She sort of came up during this sort of social media age as a person who sort of developed this kind of very relatable online persona. And she's also had a career that's been shaped in some ways by the internet. She experienced an episode of sort of criticism or backlash a few years ago online, which led her to leave her job at the New York Times and eventually start her own newsletter. So she's kind of experienced the highs of online fame and also some of the lows.

4:05But most importantly for us today is that she loves to give advice. That's right. She recently started an advice podcast. It's called Solicited Advice, where she answers listeners' questions, not unlike what we do on this segment, which we call hard questions. So we're thrilled to have her here today. Let's bring her in here.

4:30Alison Romer, welcome to Hard Fork. Hello, happy to be here. How are you? I'm well, how are you? I'm great. I'm so thrilled that you are here today. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh my gosh, of course. I love podcasts. I love your podcasts. So glad to have you here. We are both big fans. Allison, I want to start by asking you what your relationship with technology is like these days. Oh, I mean, these days it is no different than it was 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago for me and all humanity in that it's fraught. I know less than I know. I if it's a source of mostly frustration and yet I am so dependent on it and and value it yeah but I I don't love it is it like when you think about what I do for a living like I need like a like a fire and a pencil you know what I mean I'm like I cook and I write and that's all I do if all the electricity were gone I could still do what I do for a living and like do what makes me happy and probably like it more, honestly.

5:39So the YouTube stuff, the newsletter, the like all of the multimedia stuff that you do, the podcast, like that's sort of just secondary for you to like the actual sort of primal act of fire plus pencil. Yeah, exactly. Like if I couldn't, I mean, yeah, I guess if I didn't have any of those things, no one would know that I was cooking or writing. So that's an issue. but in terms of like if the electricity went out for everybody let's say that, you know what I mean? I could still do the two things that I do. Let me ask this about technology. You know, there was a time when I was very interested in cooking things but had not spent a lot of time like watching your YouTube videos or cooking your recipes, cooking other recipes and I would walk into like a surlataab and I would see technology as far as the eye could see and I would think if I could just have like 14 of these gadgets, like they would heal me and I would get good at cooking.

6:33My sense from reading your work is like you never had a similar moment, but I would just love to hear your thoughts about kind of the world of cooking gadgets. Yeah, that's exactly correct. I think I had the opposite feeling and I still do today, which I'm like very proud of. I've evolved, of course, in some opinions and, you know, tracing back things that I've said 10 years ago. I'm like, okay, well, my opinions have changed. But one thing that I feel pretty steadfast in is that like, I think when it comes to cooking, you need so much less than what the world has told you that you do. And when you look at, I think the way that most of the food is cooked around the world and some of the best food cooked around the world, they're doing it with like one vessel and a fire or like, you know, there's a knife maybe, you know?

7:15And I think that at its basic principles, like that's really all you need. And I find that anything that you plug in while convenient can also cause like a detachment from you in the process. And cooking for me is very soulful human experience. And I'm sure you could argue an alternative point of view here, but I think that technology in the cooking space removes us a lot from that and makes it more like machine and more uniform and more soulless. Yeah. Right. What about other kinds of technology? Like, I'm curious, are you a person who struggles with your like screen time and sort of has to make kind of interventions on your own behalf to try to get away from technology?

8:02Or does it come pretty naturally for you? I will say it used to be a lot worse. I used to have like a real sickness, especially with things like Instagram and even Twitter. But then I just kind of the pleasure button stopped working so much and not because, you know, it wasn't like metrics are down and like all this stuff. It was more just like, oh, like it doesn't hit the same, you know? And also it's just not as fun. I think, you know, I sort of like came of age on Instagram, if you will. Like I started posting on Instagram when like, you know, there's two followers or whatever. And you, the way that you can be when no one's watching is very different than the way that you should be when everybody is.

8:45And so now that there's more people watching, there is a something there that prevents me from engaging in a way that keeps me juiced up, I guess. I'm curious what your relationship is with YouTube versus something like Instagram, right? Your YouTube home movie series, which I don't think I've ever missed an episode of, is super polished. It's super fun. It's funny. It's very artful. It's very considered. Whereas, you know, I think Instagram sort of tends to be more casual. How are you finding YouTube as a creative outlet? I think now YouTube is basically like for anybody interested in creating like high-ish to high-end content.

9:33Like it's a really easy, accessible platform for you to put your content on. It's sort of just like the people's television now. You can find things that are like television quality, documentary quality, movie quality on YouTube. Because people are like, well, am I going to wait around for somebody to pick this up on like a streamer or like a network television channel? Or am I just going to put it up for people to see? And I think more people are opting for that. Also, sometimes because the money can be better. You have more control. There's more creative power. and it's you know less red tape I guess and also just for anyone who's like you know what I'm gonna do it myself I'm gonna protect my own whatever which Casey I know you're a fan of yeah I knew really early on when I decided to put my content on YouTube that I was not gonna win the YouTube game I was like I'm starting too late and I'm too old and too like under supported as like a person who understands the technology themselves.

10:30Like I'm not filming my own content and editing my own content and like uploading it. You know what I mean? Like I'm very much. Well, it's also not your full-time job. Like that's one thing I thought about. You know, like as a person who makes stuff that goes on YouTube, like I am not spending 12 hours a day thinking about YouTube. Which really puts you at a disadvantage relative to the full-timers. Totally, yeah. And those full-timers, like those are the people with like millions of subscribers. Like that is their brand identity. That is the thing that they, you know, go for and focus on. And the numbers show that.

10:58And I just knew that that wasn't going to be me. I'm always really interested in how solo creators or kind of, you know, solo adjacent are building their businesses. You know, you sort of said, well, YouTube's not my full-time job. But I'm curious what you think your full-time job is. You know, you write cookbooks. You have a store now. You have a podcast. You have a newsletter. Like, does one of—because, like, for me, my newsletter feels like my real job. And Hard Fork is something I get to do for fun, and it's a great time. Oh, thanks. I'm glad you take our podcast so seriously Is this a joke to you?

11:33But do you have something like that where you feel like oh like this is the thing and like this is the business and everything else is just kind of a fun creative project or is it more like well they're like a bunch of like different businesses and I just kind of have to find a way to stitch them all together Yeah I think it's more the latter I think that I do find that they all contribute to one another also like if I had to pair it back I'd be like okay I write cookbooks first and foremost, because those I only do every two to three years, right? I'm in the process now of writing another one.

12:02So like, I'm gonna sort of downshift on everything else so I can focus on that. And that becomes the priority. It's like a longer lead time. It's a bigger lift. It's just sort of its own thing. But in the days or months when that's not the case, yeah, it's sort of, it's just about like making time for everything, which like I'm kind of realizing I don't know that I have. And I thought that I would. I thought that everything could just kind of like, you know, chug along. And I think that now I'm sort of breaking it down to like, okay, like seasonality and being like, okay, like this podcast doesn't have to just run indefinitely.

12:36I can do like seasons of it and I can do like specialized versions of it. And same thing with YouTube. You're like, okay, well you can actually just not be there for a month and you can come back. Like if you need, because I'm not playing that game. Right. Right. Um, the newsletter I should be spending more time on and, and we'll come back to that. But I think I think, you know, that to me is like, no, go ahead. If you want a tip for making your podcast more sustainable, you could just do what Casey did and get a co-host who does all the work. Honestly, would love that. Kevin, if you are looking to diverse, if Casey's not giving you what you need, I also have an advice podcast.

13:13Thank you. Yeah, let's chat. Let's chat offline. All right. So we are going to get to our listeners' questions now because that is actually what you are here to do. But we're going to pause and take a break. And when we come back, we will have your hard questions.

13:50All right. Our first question comes from a listener named Jacob Rosenblum from Ferndale, Washington, who has noticed a pattern at many of the companies he's worked for. The companies don't communicate with employees about who has been fired or left. Jacob, however, figured out a way around this. What he does is use a query called an Active Directory PowerShell command to search his company system. I'm sure we've all done this. He looks for information about when employees last logged into Workplace Tools, whether they still have access to files to ultimately figure out who is no longer working at the company.

14:22And some of the information that he's turned up, gang, is pretty surprising. Here's Jacob. Hi, Forkers. One time I learned from using this query that a coworker who runs a meeting had been fired. I reached out to the QA lead for my company, who didn't realize they had been fired, and we quickly brought someone else in to run the meeting. Another time, I saw a coworker show up from my query and I sent a message to a manager. I see that so-and-so has ridden off into the sunset. She replied that he had actually died the previous weekend. I try to use this information for good and share what I learned with managers who don't know how to use this tool.

14:58Is this sort of information gathering improper or is this totally fine given my company's lack of communication? Allison, how are you using Active Directory PowerShell commands? You know, it's been so long since I've used it. I'm a little rusty, if you guys want to just refresh my memory on what that is, because it's just been a minute. Casey, why don't you refresh your memory? Well, look, I'll be honest. I've never used that one myself either. But look, you know, there are these systems inside these companies that if you poke around, you can get access to stuff that maybe the bosses don't know about.

15:32So do we think it's kosher to kind of, you know, plumb the depths of your company systems to figure out who still works there? Me? Yeah. I'll take this one. Yeah. Well, do the bosses not know because they don't care? It's like, you know what I mean? If this person is like taking it upon himself to be like, I must find out the information when everyone's like, nobody cares. Yeah. I would say like I'm I'm curious why Jacob felt like disclosing this information, because a thing that I've noticed at some companies that I've worked at in the past is like there are these little kind of, I don't know, cracks in the system where you can kind of get access to information that other people don't know is there.

16:12And that gives you a tremendous amount of power. I'm thinking in particular about an old company that I used to work at where one of the people in HR accidentally emailed a spreadsheet of everyone's salary to someone who wasn't supposed to see it. and that the people who saw that spreadsheet like had a lot of leverage you know as long as they didn't disclose that they had seen the spreadsheet but they could say like i think this person might be making more than me for the same job and then go in and ask for a raise so i would just say like get this power but like keep it to yourself i think that's good advice you know like for me the bar is like look did you steal someone's password in order to find out this information if so don't do it but like if you just typed on your keyboard and you found out that someone doesn't work there anymore, that's fine.

16:51Yeah. All right. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the next question. This one comes from a listener whose name is also Allison. This is Allison from Arizona, and she's very concerned about protecting her child's image from facial recognition technology. But recently, when she went to register her kid for daycare, she learned that she might have to choose between getting childcare and her kid's privacy. Here's Allison. Hi, Hard Fork. After months of being on a wait list, a spot for my two-year-old opened at one of my top choices of daycare. As a precondition of registration, I was asked to sign a photo release giving the daycare rights to use my child's image in promotional materials, including online content.

17:30I raised concerns that images uploaded to the internet could be available to train AI facial recognition technology, but the response was that I could sign the photo release or not take the daycare spot. Why is it okay for child care providers to demand, through a photo release, the ability to provide this training data to the algorithms, potentially impacting their future privacy? And is there anything that can be done? Oof. Alison Roman, what do you think? What do you make of this? I mean, it's sort of like two questions, right? Like, is this okay? And also, what do I do? And I don't know how hard it is to get into these schools.

18:03I'm sure very. And, you know, you sort of have to like weigh the, what are they going to do with the information? Does that con outweigh the pro of them going to the school that I really want them to go to that feels like it's going to enrich their life and make my life better as well as a parent? I don't know. I sort of, not to sound nihilistic, but I sort of feel like with all surveillance and AI and facial recognition and cameras and all that, it's like, we've already lost. You know, like there are cameras on every corner. People are taking pictures of us. Like when I go to the airport, yeah, I belong to Clear, Delta One, TSA.

18:35I'm like, get me into the plane. You know what I mean? At this point, I don't know that like not signing up for Clear is going to be the thing that like takes it down. You know, they're going to do it anyway. So I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's actually a thing that people have heard about the concept of privacy nihilism, where it's like, we already lost. Why does it matter? You know, I have a kid, I do post photos of my kid on a private social media account, but I don't put them publicly on the Internet. And there are a couple of reasons I've, you know, my wife and I have chosen to do that.

19:05One of them is this sort of like AI of it all. But there's also just stuff that has nothing to do with AI. There are lots of like predators on the Internet. And I think that's something that a lot of parents are worried about as well. And the thing that actually tipped me over the line on this, because we were sort of grappling with what to do with this, is seeing that Mark Zuckerberg did not post photos of his kids' faces on Instagram. He would, like, put little emojis over them, which a lot of celebrities also do with their kids. And I was like, well, if Mark Zuckerberg has chosen not to put his kids' faces on the internet, like, that probably indicates that I shouldn't do it either.

19:39Yeah, if Mark Zuckerberg isn't like, it's fine. Right. I mean, we know it's not fine, but like even when he's like, it's not fine. Yeah. I mean, I guess my advice for our listener would be like, I think it's a red flag that the daycare won't accommodate this. Yes. Right. As a parent, that is a great rebuttal. It's a pretty reasonable thing to ask. Like a condition of sending my kid to daycare shouldn't be that their images get used on the Internet. So like, I don't know, I would drill down a little bit to figure out, well, what exactly are you planning to use this for? You know, is it like a promotional Instagram account?

20:14Could you just use photos of the other kids? Like, why do you need my kid's face specifically? But yeah, that seems to me like an indication that this is not a place that may be willing to work with you on other things. If you can't bring peanut butter to class, you should also be able to opt out of the like AI facial recognition, you know? Yeah, I agree with you on that, Kevin. If they're going to be unreasonable about this, they're going to be unreasonable about something else. And I do think it's worth making a stink over it because it's not just the AI training. It's also like, you're going to take my child's gorgeous face and use it to sell your preschool.

20:44Like I should actually just have a say in that, right? Or like give me a discount on your daycare or something. So that's, you know, am I getting compensated for this usage? Yeah. What's your day rate? That's what I would do. But I would do a lot for free, free or reduced price daycare. That stuff is expensive, you know? Yeah. But I also do want to underline something that Allison said, which is like a camera is going to take a photo of your child's face somewhere and you're not going to be able to opt out. And I don't want to sound like a nihilist because I do think that we should fight against surveillance everywhere.

21:15But, you know, probably something to keep in mind. All right. Our next question is about what happens when people are rude to digital assistants like Siri. Let's hear the clip. Hi, my name is Nick and I live in Oakland, California. My son loves tools, so I recently took him to a hardware store to look around where he became fixated on a magnetic grabber tool. While in the process of explaining to my son what magnets were and how they worked, I accidentally triggered Siri via my Apple Watch. It misheard what I said about magnets and thought I had instead called it a homophobic slur. Siri lightly scolded me for my behavior and sent me some links to resources from the human rights campaign.

21:58This mishap made me realize how easily digital assistants misunderstand us, but it also raised a fear. Does how we treat our digital assistants get tracked and influence how they interact with us? For example, if someone keeps telling Siri to shut up, will it learn to give shorter responses over time? As a result of this fear, I even caught myself scolding others for being rude to my digital assistants. Am I weird for thinking about this, or is this a legitimate concern? I mean, first of all, this man's Apple Watch is not just going to sit around and take it when slurs are being uttered in the Home Depot.

22:32Yeah. Allison, how do you feel about the way that people talk to their digital assistant? Have you ever heard somebody saying something to their digital assistant and thought, hmm, I don't like the tone? No, but I did used to date someone who was very codependent on their digital assistant, which is a very generous term. it was like Siri and Alexa and it was like every I'm like can't you do anything on your own I'm like just Google it like if I'm either Siri or Alexa I'm gonna be like read a book but I think that like people being rude in general is really upsetting to me and like we shouldn't be rude even to our phones because if you're speaking it out loud into your phone someone around you is gonna hear you and even just hearing someone be rude to like it's like have you ever been to dinner with someone and they're shitty to the server nothing worse like truly nothing worse than that yeah such a deal breaker for any sort of relationship friendship partnership anything i can't imagine and if you're like that with your digital assistant then you're probably a shitty person to a server i imagine yeah i agree i i am polite to all of my like ais and digital assistants i even caught myself i got out of a Waymo like self-driving car the other day and like oh my gosh you're not getting in those they so they're scary are you both in San Francisco yes yeah wait did you take did you take a ride or one while you were here the other way but I saw them and I was like on mission and I looked looking over and there's no one in the car and I'm thinking well that's not gonna end well yeah they're so fun all the time and I caught myself the other day like as I was getting out like thanking the driver of the self-driving car I was like thanks one time I told an Uber driver I loved them.

24:12I was getting out and I was like, love you, bye. I was like, what? Well, I think that here's what I do think is I think that the increase of digital assistance, be it an actual vehicle or a Siri or type thing, will make us more rude as people because we are going to have less and less empathy for the person that we're interacting with because it's not a person. So we're going to think of them as a machine, as a tool, as a whatever. And then you get in an Uber and you don't say thank you because you're so accustomed to being in a Waymo or whatever they're called. And you're not saying thank you because there's no one there.

24:44Or you're like, oh, well, I'm just asking Siri something. So I'm going to talk to like my barista. You know, I think it's going to desensitize us a bit. I think it totally could. I also think, though, that like these systems will just like mimic human beings over time. And like most empathetic people are going to have trouble being mean to something that sounds like a person, even if you sort of know in your heart that it's not. It's like when you remember when those videos came out of the robot dogs and people kicking the robot dogs. They were like these these robot, you know, Boston. I can't believe they caught you doing that on video, by the way.

25:16But people were like kicking the robot dogs to, you know, show off how they could sort of get back on their feet. And people were like really upset that there were like videos of people kicking robot dogs. I think you're right. I think we're going to sort of as these assistants get smarter and smarter, we're just going to feel stranger and stranger talking to them in like such a short and unkind. way. Well, Kevin, let me ask you one thing, because I've heard parents say that they are extra nice to the digital assistants in their house because they don't want their kids to hear them being rude.