596: Taking the Temp on Food Media, Podcasts, Creators, Pop-Ups, and Today’s Dining Culture with Tasteland

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. Daisy Aliotto and Frances Zaire. Daisy is the CEO of Dirt Media, a next-generation entertainment brand using emerging technology to tell the coolest stories about culture and collecting. Frances is the editor of Creator Spotlight, a weekly newsletter about creators across the world of newsletters. I joined Daisy and Frances to talk about media, the power of the podcast, and some of the work we do here at Taste. It's a little behind the scenes, but also such a great conversation about the media today. I hope you enjoy it.

1:07Welcome to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Frances Zerer. And I'm Daisy Aliotto, and I'm very relieved that Frances is back. I'm back. It was, you know, it's been the long two weeks without me. I know. Well, long for me, but not for you. You were chilling in Mexico. I was chilling in Mexico, work off-site. I'd never been to Mexico before. Interesting. Yeah. I still haven't really been to Mexico. I would say, yeah. Maybe we can do a little Taysla in Mexico City, John. That would be fun. That would be fun. I have an open invitation from one of our freelancers that lives in Mexico City. To stay at their house.

1:46Yeah. I was like, I don't. Are you sure? And she was like, yeah, whenever. You should do it. This is how the chorizo is made, people. Yeah. um anyways speaking of theresa who are we talking to today we're talking to matt rodvard he's a writer editor and author of food and culture books with more than two decades of experience working in television magazines book publishing and online media uh he has a podcast called taste this is taste yes um he has taste but he doesn't have land so well neither do we And neither do we. No, we have millennial real estate online, though. Good callback. Anyways, I'm a fan of his work.

2:26I'm a fan of his podcast. We've had his often co-host, co-podcaster, Eliza Barbernell on the pod. Yeah, me too. He's also the founding editor of Taste, the publication. Yeah. I should say that, of which this is Taste's part. Anyways, I was at the Webby's last night. You were at the Webby's last night, and you took a selfie with the Rizzler. I did. Well, it wasn't a selfie. our mutual friend Ari uh did take the photo um I have to say this picture of me with the Rizzler is you look much older than him well it's because I'm about 21 years older than him give or take a couple years uh but uh okay so he was there because he won an award uh with this video that our mutual friend Ari from air my old employer my old boss uh they made a video with him they won uh they had a whole table i was not sitting with him i was sitting i didn't win but i would like to say for the record i did not pay to enter no which is the only way you can win you have to pay to enter yeah which is like any award show like you know i think the oscars you don't but the grammys the emmys i know you do um anyways the risdler it was 10 p.m it was his bedtime um i imagine far be it for me to say i suppose but i was really impressed by his composure uh his willingness to take the picture um yeah shout out to that guy he's i don't know five booms for the rizzlers maturity five booms for the rizzler you know he's properly rated perhaps underrated uh average was he having i don't know i was uh what beverage were you having i was i had some white wine anyways okay well i'm seeing the did not have white wine the the rizzler did not have the rizzler had no i just hope they did something special for him um okay i was just talking about the webbies i was at the webbies last night um not as a winner but as press uh but i wanted as a come on daisy i didn't even apply i'm actually not a loser because i did not submit creator spotlight or tasteland to be a webby so i was just as press um which is great but i wanted to bring up some food webbies um just briefly okay so there's a number of you know food related categories we're not going to go over all of them but um i was there in the capacity of writing about they've got this new creator category right like it's the webbies have always kind of had creator awards but now they've got a specific one but anyways this was the one that was most interesting to me the most viral award in the critter category categories um which is the webbies one which is the formal voting body right and then there's the people's voice which is the one where anyone can vote but um most viral took the formal award not the people's voice for sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber most important question are we talking english cucumber are we talking like some kind of fancy varietal that is it did you not see these videos i did see these videos yeah so it must be english i think it's an english standard oh this is the tiktok guy that makes the cucumber salads and shakes yes it's that guy and he's like in a lake um okay it's cool well we'll do one more though uh before we move on from this the creator winner for the food and drink category specifically the webby the formal webby went to the babish culinary universe okay people's voice went to joshua weisman weisman he's the biggest food creator on youtube like hands down uh and he just split up his his universe he's doing his uh around the globe stuff and then he's back to his traditional weisman in the kitchen slapping his ass like you know flexing his muscles and i like that pivot for him that he's back in the kitchen not just doing like the top 10 chicken sandwiches around the world kind of stuff which is no shade i like that stuff too what do you think francis about the about the these guys yeah i think i mean what's what's most interesting to me is like the definition of creator and i would say both of these guys are creators but they're so matured as a type of creator right like when i this this is like one of my ongoing bits on creator spotlight my the newsletter and podcast is like what does it have a lot of bits i have a lot But I have two definitions.

6:48One is more broad, which would fit really anybody, fit all of us, fit anybody on any category of these webbies, right? Is somebody contributing to the corpus of the internet. But my more specific one, especially as it relates to my usual work, it's like somebody creating content for distribution online to an audience beyond their immediate friends and family who is trying in some ways to monetize it. But another thing that I've kind of removed and added from my definition at various times is this idea of independence, right? And I think Babish is part of this network. They're both part of talent management networks, but I think they're both still relatively independent.

7:26But it's like when the Grammys have Best New Artist and they've been around for 10 years, right? Yeah, it's like Her gets that award every year. I feel Her has been the Best New Artist for the past 10 years. It's new every year. Yeah. What about – so I listened to your recent episode with Robert Sitsima, one of my favorite food critics who, as we all know, we've talked about this actually multiple times on the podcast, was laid off from Eater around six months or so ago. And now he has a newsletter on Substack. And now I don't read Eater. I couldn't tell you the last time I went. I stopped reading after that.

8:03I actually still check it like once a week. But I used to check it every morning. um i i it's i'm i'm much less informed on you know actually food is one of the categories that i just don't know if we're going to be doing a lot of linking from clone um you know it's like how much culture of the tech and culture do we want to be doing but i maybe i should add either to the blog roll you should add taste to your uh clone and by the way as a sidebar congratulations super fly design i think i was a visitor 11 750 uh what an endorphin rush to have that at the top of your page every day must say thank you it's it's terrific i love that i love what you're doing there thank you so much yeah the response has been really positive very cool sorry i had to say that no i think well we were going to talk about clone a little we were going to talk about clone at some point um i do i do want to you know as as uh by using the the robert tzima transition though i do still want to talk about that so one thing that i found really interesting is right around the time he was laid off and all these a few other of his colleagues were laid off from eater um mike chow of food baby new york he had a listicle speaking of you know 10 best chicken sandwiches a listicle of like i think it was like the 24 best slices of cake in new york city that was published in eater and it was his first byline in eater though he'd been used as a source for longer features twice um and i found that to be really interesting and not really a coincidence right that like right when a bunch of these much more longer tenured writers were laid off mike chow yeah instagram guy are you are you are you sensing a a sea change shift i have i have a thought on that strategy uh but i get a sense francis from your the the wind up that this is not your the eater this is not like the lockhart steel eater that you that you loved before well we sort of talked about it in the context of like lindy man and cold healing and gq nick patucci then bringing which is like all around the same time instead of the i mean gawker is a prime example and that legacy carried through deadspin and now defector you take these writers you give them a platform and they build their platform through their affiliation with the publication now the strategy is take people that already have a platform and you know bring them onto the publication in hopes that they will bring their audience with them um which is i think it's a short-term versus a longer long-term game agree fully i think it's absolutely an audience development strategy from from eater and i i'll just say my take on eater i think they're doing terrific journalism like betita muck lentil like rebecca marks at international i think it's worth reading i think what jaya saxine is is writing is great i'm not trying to stand for eater these are just long-time colleagues.

11:03So I just have to say, I read it and link to it. And I think it's really, really important work. And we can talk about the death of the website, the webpage, the single page of the article text on the screen, because I have a lot of thoughts. But I think it's an audience development play to bring in creators to do text on page articles and hoping that there's a halo effect for traffic from Food Baby or whoever it may be writing these listicles. They got to do what they got to do to develop audience, right? um i didn't read that piece i'm not sure if it was good or bad um tend to probably not read a food baby byline in eater at least so i'm not drawn to it by the byline but i i think that they're just trying to get any by any means possible get people to read eater.com and i know i totally agree and i mean look i will i'll i'll engage with a food baby instagram post it's no shade to him and it's no doubt to like you know what you have to do to to survive um but it is more to me like a bummer in that I specifically went to either to read Robert's work, right?

12:03So now I go there, but much less. But one thing Robert said on that episode you did with him is that the food critic is being supplanted by social media, which not necessarily a new thing, but you guys talked about how that's not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. I mean, Robert is somebody who I think has a really great take on everything. I don't think he's bitter. I think that he knew that this day would come for him and he doesn't want to be the the grumpy old guy talking about initiating the creators who are out there doing what they will, which could be giving really poor, lukewarm takes about restaurants.

12:38Some of it's paid and completely PR driven, and some of it is very thoughtful. And it is maybe supplanting or at least complimenting the food critic. And I think with Robert, it's like, go to his subsec and pay 30 bucks a year and get Robert's take on the city's publishing multiple subsecs a week. it's good stuff and he's doing the work which with when it comes to food writing you really can't growth hack this thing like if it's if it's literally like local journalism covering a city or covering a state you can't growth hack it you have to literally go in put your butt in the seat order the food try it out like there that's why it's very very there's a low margin with food media because of the the time it takes to do the work and the cost it takes to do the work so i think I love that.

13:29Thank you for listening to the episode. I think it was really important that he got it out there that he's just still being Robert and riding his bicycle around, going to all the great restaurants that we have never heard of. The Bill Cunningham of food media. Oh my gosh. He is tireless. And the Robert Seeds in a documentary will happen. I'm sure there's a young entrepreneurial filmmaker who will be linking with him. And I thought the Jonathan Gold documentary was very up and down. It was fine. It was a pretty good documentary, but I think Roberts is a totally different ballgame. And I hope somebody actually does that because I think it would be a terrific piece.

14:04Well, you said he's writing a memoir, right? He's writing a memoir slowly. And I think I've been able to acquire a bunch of early editions or I guess editions of Down the Hatch, his original copy and paste zine that he did at his job after hours. He stole the copy ink from his job. and he's he's such an original voice out there and and we got a treasure robber for his work are they making a keith mcnally movie who you guys somebody has to have i bought i ordered the book the other day i have not read it yet i haven't read it yet either i wasn't about star i flexed i got the mcgalley what a flex and i read it and i also read the great and carter back to back i was doing i i didn't read uh perfect double feature i didn't read the lorne the lorne is just too much and you know hagiography perhaps but i think the they're both very different i thought mcnally's was it's he's so like he's so literary the man loves books and it's tremendous to see his him flexing especially um in the early sections about the books he read as a kid and you know his his uh his relationships with um really the the highest level of of london um the the the the the world of of plays and and like academia he was in that those circles at a young age really cool cool book um one more thing on the the food crater aspect i want to talk yeah is i've been noticing this might just be my own personal feed and you know my own algorithmic curation over the past few years but i feel like i've been starting to notice more critical people making these instagram reels right like as perhaps you know your your eaters lay off their last staff food critic um specifically people like rob martinez in new york city i think he's really good james dimitri in london this guy johnny novo in new york city who just does rotisserie chicken reviews these are all people who i think aren't doing purely positive promotional basically freelance marketing for restaurants.

16:14Not that it's not that too, but there's like, they're going to say the chicken was dry. This tea sucked, you know, this kind of thing. And I feel like I wasn't seeing that as much a couple of years ago. Maybe this is some kind of recency bias, but I do think that there is more and more thriving, actually critical engagement with some of these people. I love the mention of Rob Martinez. He's been on our show and I really respect his work. And I think you're absolutely right. And I think that's a matter of more folks moving on to Reels and TikTok for their food knowledge. And really, the audience is becoming more discerning.

16:54And so the stretchy cheese polls from the sisters is for a certain audience. But I think if you want to look at food critically, there's people who are just migrating over to this social video platform that we all love. And you're right. They're talking shit sometimes. And it's important to see it. I think it's like very powerful to have somebody on mic and on camera say, I don't like this food because it definitely has more power than a than a written article and a takedown. And I think you're seeing it also in traditional food media. So you're seeing McKenzie out in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle critic is doing video reviews, essentially, or getting on camera.

17:42I think you're going to see the New York Times critics, and possibly the new critic do more video reviewing. So I think there's definitely you're seeing it in more traditional spaces as well. And the LA Times has done as well. Mackenzie Chung Fagan, sorry, I couldn't remember her full name. She's such a terrific critic out in San Francisco. I just think it's like they're finding the audience where they are. And I think the people who have been really married to reading text on the page are just not doing it anymore. I feel this is a little bit of a theme I want to talk about. As somebody who edits and really puts a lot of work, Eliza Barbanal, my co-editor here at Taste, we commit a lot of time like you folks do at Dirt to working in rounds.

18:21We're in the Word docs. We're doing the line edits, but it's frustrating as fuck, man. It's frustrating right now. I'm just being honest, being candid. You mean like because the amount of attention shared going towards short form video versus text? Yeah, and podcasts too. And just with AI, you know, becoming the go-to and just you just have to recognize this rapid-sea change is affecting it. And it is traffic. And I say to anyone in our world here, we don't have page view KPIs on our business plan and on our editorial plan. We publish the work we think is important and we hope the audience will find it.

19:03We did this big story about Trader Joe's last year by Adam Reiner's terrific piece. And that got a million page views, literally. So we have breakouts once in a while, but week to week with our slate of stories, we're struggling to get people to read it. And this is like my mom, like my mom's not reading taste right now. And I'm like, my mom, it's like my mom. And it's not because my mom doesn't want to read taste is that she's on social video. She's listening to these podcasts. My mom reads dirt. She was the person to text me about my polo bar poem in black. Your mom is awesome. I love that your mom is reading dirt as she should.

19:36And my mom less awesome, at least in terms of reading taste. Maybe your, my mom is reading dirt. Frankly, that might be, that might be. Yeah, we got her. Well, I still think about the illustration on TJ's story about horses. oh that's classic it was so good yeah i think it was even like was it a gif it was we did some animation with that uh honestly yeah i mean the more there's slop there is we always sort of like i mean we've never like done all stock photos but a lot of our artwork unless it's a special package is a bit of an afterthought it's like oh god somebody spin up something in canva yeah and honestly like the worse everything online starts to look the more i've wanted to double down and invest in custom illustration um and i think maybe this is a bit of a controversial take you guys don't have to co-sign but as a woman i will say i was out i was at um merriweather coffee the other day meeting somebody on hudson street there was a line obviously and there were two women in a row who had like clearly had work done.

20:45They had basically the same nose, the same face, TikTok face. And then there was a woman standing behind them who had more of a like distinctive profile. And I, I realized that like my eyes could not rest on the first two women. It's like, my eyes just like slid past them. I couldn't like really even like look at them. Like not because they weren't attractive to look at. They were beautiful women, but like there was nothing to hang my gaze on. But then the third woman, I was sort of like kind of staring at her. Because I was like, she looks distinct. And I feel the same way about the internet right now.

21:19Like, obviously, do whatever you want with your face, your body, your choice. But I think like, there always is a pendulum swing back to the things that actually are distinctive and attract our gaze. And like, The more sameness there is, the more the things that just don't look like everything else stand out. And the problem is you have to have enough people drawn to that and willing to pay for it to support it. But I do think it's possible to move people over and take them from being consumers of slop to consumers of tasteful, bespoke content. Um, it's just figuring out what is the pathway that you build from one to the other.

22:12And, you know, how do you take somebody who, who grew up not paying for content and turn them into somebody who proudly pays for content or if not content, something else in the world of your publication, maybe it's not content. advertising revenue yeah yeah i co-signed on that big time and i think having big art is important to us at taste and ellie skirs i think did that hello and we we definitely have a visual identity that people come back for and deviating from the mean and having um not canva or ai generated art or even like the standard food photography i think we at taste have bucked doing too much art uh like food photography driven lead imagery on our on our on our home page and on the on the social uh crops that we do for all the the platforms i think we just need to have i mean illo doesn't always play well with seo but seo is dead so good riddance and it just is important to have a strong visual identity that i think green carter writes about in his memoir back to that is like, you know, big art and having a real point of view with art direction, as he does at Airmail now, is so key to being that place that, you know, maybe you don't have a million UVs, but if we have a really high quality 200k UVs and a really big newsletter following, got to invest in that stuff.

23:33And we pay our illustrators. And I just firmly believe that a visual identity is how you get people in. This is how I think about like, laying out the newsletter laying out career spotlight every week is like i do the test of like scroll up and down really quick and if it all kind of looked the same then we fucked up and we need to like make some custom graphic or find the right screenshot or like some instagram post from you know the person we're interviewing whatever but i i think it's easy for people to forget that a newsletter is a visual medium i think even before it's a written medium you know um that's which is a line I got from Ernie Smith, who writes the newsletter Tedium.

24:11He's been doing for like a decade, but he got his start as like a newspaper layout guy like 20 years ago. And ever since he told me that it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's the details of the headings even whatever. But like, I, you know, you, you have to think about it in terms of visual texture, the information doesn't matter if it's not attractive enough for people to stick around and consume it. Yeah. That's why I think so many magazine editors keep their jobs because, and I mean like the ones from the 90s and the early 2000s, I think that when you think visually and you think of the story as a full package, that's why Janice Min has a great job.

24:49That's why Graydon Carter is still working. Tina Brown is still doing her, I mean, she's doing a Substack, but I think she was on a podcast recently talking about she just needs Substack to come to her and meet her somewhere with the visual identity of Substack. I think it really frustrates her. Good luck, Tina. That was on the mixed signals. Oh, shit, yeah, great. We got mixed signals hive here. It's a terrific podcast. They've really jumped ahead of a lot of media podcasts with a great mix of stories. But I think that it's like, there's like consumers that haven't changed like full stop. They want every element to be premium and cool.

25:32And I think Dirt, I mean, I really, when you say you do Canva, Dirt has a visual identity to me. I mean, it's fully internet, online first, obviously. But you guys are clever and you have a lot of humor with your lead logos and even if it's a screenshot. And you have to do it that way. You just can't just throw up. That's why I literally throw up. I am going to throw up when I think about some of the way this art is literally thrown up like like the like the pattern background with the bad silo art like that's fucking so bad. I'm I'm I can't believe that still works on the Internet. Yeah, I I do think we have a distinct visual identity in it.

26:14And I like to think it's not just that like Daisy touched it at some point. um and i do like when i was working together with walden we would often align on the same idea like when he wrote about why the price of eggs is such a site for political paranoia and projection we were both like this needs an illustration i think we texted each other at the same time like broken egg um you know so uh and that's what we ended up doing but i like beehive recently um Just change the way that you do your design build. Like all of the capabilities are the same, but they changed it a little bit. And in the course of migrating our newsletters, some of our presets got changed.

26:59And the one that I noticed was actually the angle of the corner on our quotes, on our block quotes. And it was like a breakthrough moment for me because I've never been so... I am definitely aesthetically inclined. mind. I don't always focus on details like kerning or, you know, the angle of the corner. But I was like, I've looked at this every day for the last two years. And basically I was like, something is wrong. And I like screenshot both of the corners and I'm comparing them and I'm showing cat. I'm like, do you see this? So he sent it to them and they, they regressed us to the old system for a little bit.

27:41So we could write down all of our presets and then they migrated us. And now it's working beautifully. And I think that's a great example of like the relationship that you want with your platform provider. But it's so funny that that like it's it's the angle of the corners, you know, and, you know, it plays into everything. We just published a piece in Prune by Sam Wells. And Sam wrote to me and said, I'm not a writer. I haven't published before. I'm a woodworker, but I have this idea to write about the legacy of Thomas Moser and his relationship to shaker design and scale. And, you know, what is shaker design?

28:20All corners, all joinery. And so I think like all of these things that don't seem related and seem like they must fall in the binary between offline and online aesthetics, it's all part of the same conversation that we're having with our readers about like the world that we want to build for them and the world that we all like ultimately want to inhabit. it. So we were talking a little bit before this about the relationship between a written product and an audio product. Matt, what is the relationship between taste as a publication and this is taste as a podcast? And has that changed over the last, you know, almost a decade?

29:01Really great question. And we are about a decade old and we didn't have a podcast when we launched in 2017. We soon launched one in 18. And it was a little bit of a more minimal show. We did once a week. We were really focused on doing four to five features a week at that point. We certainly have flipped it in the past two years. And that's simply because we are seeing tremendous interest engagement from our podcast. And for us, you know, here at Penguin Random House, which is the parent company of Taste, Crown Publishing Group, we really want engagement with what we're writing, you know, we aren't about just throwing shit up.

29:48And I really wanted to come to where the audience was at. And looking at, you know, just the Spotify numbers and Apple is in a black box, as you know, so we don't know our Apple audience at all. But looking at Spotify, which is about 15 % of our audience, our completion rate is really great. We have 50%, 60 % go into the last quarter of the pod. And that all is to say, we just want people to engage with what we're doing here at Taste, which is covering the culture of food, frankly. And we just felt like we needed to scale back our features. So now we're doing one big feature a week. plus two newsletters.

30:28And every other week, we're publishing a terrific cooking column from Zola Gregory. And with the added time resources away from the features, we're in the pod world. And we're publishing three to four podcasts a week, which is insane. It's a high metabolism pod, but it is insane. And Clayton, our terrific lead producer, is to credit to keep up with the pace of the editing. And I really commend Clayton for just keeping up with it. And for us, I think the always on pod is where we need to be right now. We have tremendous download traffic and we have a lot of partnerships built around our audience.

31:08But really for us, it's mostly we want to commit full episodes to people who may be getting the C segment or D segment or not even booked on other shows in our cohort. We just want to give them the space. So we give our audience the choice. Do you want to do four hours with This Is Taste a week? or do you want to dip in and do one? We find a lot of listeners are somewhere in between and doing a couple episodes a week. But it's kind of our editorial strategy to think about each episode as a real portrait of the guest. And then we have other segments. You and I like to catch up for our three things segment.

31:44We'll have a lot of journalists on. We just launched - Foodriders talking about food, right? Yeah, we got this YouTube show that has been really fun and we're trying to really, we don't do a lot of full episodes on YouTube. We do mostly social clips, but we wanted our only like full episode show to be talking about the industry, talking about work, like what you do on your show, on your podcast. You talk about a lot of the work in the industry and we wanted to do that, but featuring writers we love. So we talk about money. I think people like that. I met somebody recently in the publishing industry and they were like, can I ask you a rude question?

32:26And I was like, yeah. And they just wanted to talk about money in a real way. Basically, how do you make this work? And that was a lot of our conversation with Sarah Leonard recently of Lux Magazine. Yeah. You know, we're doing an award together for the best hybrid criticism, personal essay about work. And I'm actually really hoping we'll get some strong submissions about the food industry, because I think that those critiques are really fun to read. And, yeah, I think there is an appetite for real conversations about how the sausage gets made. This is the second time using a version of that phrase on this very day.

33:12But what are like, okay, obviously money, distribution, dwindling number of places to do text criticism. All of these things are important topics of conversation ongoing. But what are some other themes that you're tracking both across various episodes of the podcast or sort of like threads that are currently running between the features? that you're selecting and the podcasts and the topics? Well, money definitely is at the center of our podcast. And we talk about money a lot. And this plays out in many different forms. We have a lot of chefs and operators of various renown. You know, the biggest, you know, Jamie Oliver was just talking about money recently.

34:01And we have, you know, chefs who just operate one restaurant in New York. And we're always talking about money because right now the restaurant industry is at a great inflection point, to use a cliche, but it really is where the dining, the diners, really the ethic of the diner and the real behavior of the diner is changing where these prices that we see on restaurant menus, not just in New York or LA, but in all cities are eye-popping, eye-watering. Irrational hospitality, as we would say. Irrational hospitality. Colin Nagy on the pod. I love Colin. I love Witty. That is a great, great, great, great subject.

34:40Well, you know, I feel like every culture, every podcast is about money except for podcasts that are supposed to be about money and they just end up being about restaurants. You know? Yeah. I mean, we talk about restaurant culture because it's on all the great podcasts. I mean, how many times has Halongan talked about restaurants? It's literally every 40 seconds. The most famous restaurant podcast there is. It really is. As in, I've had both Jason and Chris on the show, and Jason's written for Taste, and they have really sharp minds about the industry and trend. But we talk about money because the diners are seeing these eye-watering prices, and they're saying, are we getting ripped off?

35:13But then we talked to Camilla Marcus, who ran Westbourne in New York for years, this really progressive thought leader in the industry. She worked at Roar, which was an alliance for industry workers. And, you know, we talked about payroll tax and how payroll tax, that 30 % tax that's added to every dollar that you spend on labor is a flat tax that is being taxed for anybody in New York, whether you run a watch store with two employees or a restaurant with 77 employees. and the fact that the watch store has to pay the same tax rate for their employees versus the restaurants. And, you know, Camille had a very simple, simple solution.

35:56It's instead of 30%, let's make it 10%. And the money that's saved from the 20 % for payroll tax allow the restaurant to invest that back into their employees, into the payroll. So we talk for benefits and for paid time off and all the things we talk about. So we talk about that a lot on the show. We also talk a little bit about the way that restaurants are cool and not cool and the way neighborhoods are cool and not cool and to use broad strokes. But I love that we can talk about the changing tastes of diners in cities like New York and L.A. and how that will trickle down effectively to the rest of the country eventually.