2025.11.25: Chomp On A Cow

Speaker 1 Got a bucket of chicken.

Speaker 1 Let's do this. Hey! We're recording the podcast!

Speaker 1 Good morning to you, wherever you are, because it is morning somewhere for November 25th, 2025. My name is Bernie Burns, sitting right over there.

Speaker 1 She is calling for the death of every senator. She burns her head ashore.
Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy.

Speaker 1 In the news today, there's like political stuff. Like one of the political things is over the weekend, the president called for

Speaker 1 charges of sedition against some other politicians who made a video telling troops to ignore illegal orders or defy illegal orders and is calling for sedition, which is punishable by death.

Speaker 1 So we have the president literally calling for the death of other politicians.

Speaker 1 Here we are.

Speaker 1 Here we are.

Speaker 1 Remember when Bill Clinton called for the death of Newt Gingrich? Yeah, he set a really poor precedent when he

Speaker 1 openly called for his death.

Speaker 2 Look, you just can't do that.

Speaker 1 Unfucking believable. Unbelievable.
So that was top of my mind. The other thing politically is that

Speaker 1 NASA is now beginning to re-evaluate Starliner and how they're going to use it. We're going to maybe put some crews back on Starliner.

Speaker 2 Wait, isn't Starliner the reason that Butch and Sonny got stranded?

Speaker 1 Butch and Sonny Saga continues for all of us. So Starliner is like on its way back.
This is the redemption tour for Starliner.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I guess this is second chances, right? Like, one, that's a fluke. If we get a second team of astronauts that are stuck up there for like 10 months because Starliner can't go home,

Speaker 2 then, you know, I feel like that's going to start to become a trend, right?

Speaker 1 You'll start to erode things.

Speaker 2 You think it might erode the trust in Starliner

Speaker 2 and Boeing in general?

Speaker 1 Honestly. All the trust that we have.

Speaker 1 We talked a ton about this Butch and Sunny thing.

Speaker 1 Talked a lot about them getting trapped up there and starliner you know having to return to earth without them yet as much as we've talked about this every time i read the name starliner it makes me think this is like a tourist in space thing like that sounds like a very like it sounds like a very consumer level product which is just it's poorly named starliner just sounds weird well it's look if you have you know the the big like ocean liners right like those were big passenger cruise ships like that's a thing and so if you name one a starliner it sounds like a space cruise ship.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I don't think that's on us, right? I feel like that's on the branding.

Speaker 1 Punishable by death on social media. Just can't get past that.
So strange. Just it's such, what a world we live in, Ash.
What a world. Sorry.
What a world.

Speaker 1 Other financial stuff.

Speaker 1 It was read an interesting article which was saying that if you if you remove the top seven companies from the S P 500, it makes this rally that's going on in the stock market look very different.

Speaker 1 And then some comicers showed up with some analysis.

Speaker 1 They were calling it like, if you look at the SP 493, essentially, the other top 500 companies, that really is just seven companies that are just blazing and blowing off the doors.

Speaker 1 But then commenters were very quick to point out, saying, you just showed us a chart after saying how it paints a very dire prediction or a picture of the economy.

Speaker 1 And the commenters were saying, if looking at your chart, if these 493 companies, if you invested in them 10 years ago, you would have an investment year by year of 14%

Speaker 1 over that 10 years, year by year.

Speaker 2 Which is big, right?

Speaker 2 When you look at the

Speaker 2 ballpark figure of, was it every seven years,

Speaker 2 money doubles? We're almost 72.

Speaker 2 And so that's based on, is that based on a lower

Speaker 2 kind of a gain or interest rate than 14%?

Speaker 1 9, 10. Just did some quick math on it.

Speaker 1 If you invested at 14% year over year, if you invested invested a hundred dollars in that you would have three hundred and seventy dollars after the end of 10 years that's i mean that's uh that's hard work for a dollar 3.7 times the amount of money that you put in so pretty good so out of that article was saying what it wanted to say right also also though to point out

Speaker 1 like indexes are like the absolute application of confirmation bias because things that don't do well drop out of the indexes and they get delisted from the index.

Speaker 2 Right. They get booted.
They get the boot.

Speaker 1 The stock market itself is like, you know, when you, when I was a kid, it was in the newspaper. You'd pull it up and you'd see all these companies.

Speaker 1 They're like, look at all these companies and they're all going up. Their stock's worth whatever.

Speaker 1 If you had to include every company that ever existed and was listed on the stock market, including the ones that went to zero and went away, Bernie, it would paint a very different picture.

Speaker 1 It would paint a very different picture. It would.
Yeah. So there is a confirmation bias that takes place there.

Speaker 2 There is. Although I will also note that, like, I don't have a lot of patience for the stock market in general.
Not at all. Because it seems

Speaker 2 the idea of buying the hype and selling the news is, I don't have a lot of patience with that. I'm like,

Speaker 2 like when they announce their numbers and they're, you know, as expected, that's, that's the company doing its job, right? Like they, yeah, they forecast accurately. That's a good thing.

Speaker 2 Uh, and everyone's like, nah, they only did as good as they said they were going to do. That's disappointing.
It's, I, you know, we're like, I'm going to time to sell.

Speaker 2 I just, I don't have a lot of patience with that sort of mentality. I would be a terrible day trader.
I can't deal with the stress.

Speaker 2 I can't deal with like the fast timelines and the turnarounds and the buying and selling on like emotional panic. I can't do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the emotional component of it is really, really tough. And that's just the amount of time that you look at that stuff because you have to go through those huge panics.

Speaker 1 There's a huge one going on right now in cryptocurrencies. Everything is dropping.
Bitcoin in particular is down 30% from its all-time high. I think it's sitting around 88,000 today, but it's not.

Speaker 2 Well, I was going to say, 80. So it dipped as low as 80, but how long ago was it that 80 was the highest it had ever been?

Speaker 1 It was funny because I think it was a year ago, Ash, the

Speaker 1 Reddit for our podcast, the subreddit, had a post where someone was like decrying Bitcoin and they were very happy to see it like plummeting.

Speaker 1 So just out of curiosity, I took the price of Bitcoin from when this podcast started and essentially January 1st of 2024. And today, here's how volatile this stuff is.

Speaker 1 If you invested in Bitcoin at any point in that process, you could be anywhere from 30% down at this point if you bought it at the all-time high, or you could be up by 200%.

Speaker 1 Whoa. Because it was like, it was like in the 40s, low 40s when we started this podcast.

Speaker 2 And that's not to say that we advise buying Bitcoin.

Speaker 1 No, you literally don't. Like, remember, there was a, I went and looked this up too.
There was a guy who showed up in the subreddit because we had talked about Bitcoin at the start of the podcast.

Speaker 1 I feel like we talked about it more. That's where the whole like not a financial advisor thing comes from or not financial advice.

Speaker 1 A guy showed up in the subreddit and showed that he had bought it, right? Right. And we were like, don't, you were in that comment saying, this is not financial advice.
We don't.

Speaker 2 My, I mean, my mentality for investing has always been that I would only invest money that I can then pretend is completely gone.

Speaker 1 You invest money you can afford to lose.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Don't if you are relying, like if you're dipping into retirement, if you're like, all right, well, if I change this or double mortgage the house or, you know, like do all these other things, then I could afford it.

Speaker 2 Then you can't afford it.

Speaker 1 Even me saying something like Bitcoin in the course of this podcast over less than two years at this point is either up 200% or down 30%.

Speaker 1 Obviously, that seems like, well, the upside was much greater. No, I mean, we could wake up tomorrow and it could be at 40%.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Based on something. Could be one company.
There's one company that has bought.

Speaker 1 Do you know who Michael Saylor is by any chance?

Speaker 2 Yes. Wait, isn't is Michael Saylor?

Speaker 2 Michael Saylor is not the guy from the big short, is he?

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. That's Michael Burry.
Burry. Who, by the way, closed that investment firm, that the fund, Scion Investments.

Speaker 1 You know, the movie where he's always writing on the whiteboard how much it's up or how much it's down? He closed that.

Speaker 1 Like this last month, he just said, basically paraphrasing here, that the fundamentals that drive the market are just completely out of whack with what he's been able to analyze in the past.

Speaker 1 And it's not based on any fundamentals that he understands. So he is closing the fund and returning all of the capital to the investors with an apology, like an open apology.

Speaker 2 I mean, it makes sense when you're just like, why are these things going crazy? It's not based on any facts. It's just based on hype.
Then how do you calculate for that?

Speaker 1 And this constant talk of a bubble like right now.

Speaker 1 The bottom line is what works for me personally is, and I've talked about this before, strategy of dollar cost averaging, just like setting aside a certain amount of money over time.

Speaker 1 And then you're not tied into like one specific price. So you talk about like day trading, that S ⁇ P 493

Speaker 1 analysis we were just talking about, that's not day trading.

Speaker 1 If you're putting money into the S P 500 for 10 years, that's a totally different ballgame than day trading.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's decade trading, right? That's the

Speaker 2 theory of investment for me is like that long term. Like what's going to last a really long time.

Speaker 2 And I also acknowledge that like, I don't necessarily have the great nose that I would like to think that I do about that.

Speaker 2 Like I thought the Microsoft movies and TV was a solid bet for investing our digital library in because it was going to be around for a long time because, hey, Microsoft is a reliable company, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, even pieces of things don't last, right? And if the pieces don't last, then what does that do to the value of the overall thing?

Speaker 2 What I'm saying is, Microsoft, maybe the reason that your stock isn't doing great, is it doing great? I don't know. I'm going to assume it's not doing great because of movies and TV.

Speaker 2 If you saw a dip, that was it. If there was ever a dip.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, 30% you think would be like, it would drive people into a pure panic.
And there are, are where that where that needle is like pegged to extreme fear.

Speaker 1 But then there's also people who are doing shit all the time that I feel like I pay attention to this stuff.

Speaker 1 And I read about people who are buying like cryptocurrencies, leveraged, you know what I mean? Or shorting cryptocurrencies. And it's just like, I guess you just don't ever want to sleep.

Speaker 1 But those kinds of people. Or maybe they just love it.
Or it's just like what's going on in the rest of the culture now with all the sports betting and everything like that.

Speaker 1 It's just like there's something in us where we like to gamble and risk.

Speaker 1 I guess that's like now that we don't go out and hunt with spears, there's some kind of conflict there, and we have to make it a conflict.

Speaker 1 This is the kind of thing, the way I grew up, I don't want to make this a conflict ever.

Speaker 2 There's something to like the uh like taking the risk, right, or like uh like making the bet, but there's a high to it, right?

Speaker 2 And uh, and I guess that's how we're getting it now instead of like fighting off saber-toothed tigers.

Speaker 1 There are very few things

Speaker 1 that cause a reaction in the pit of my stomach more than watching people who gamble on live streams. Like that's the whole thing now.
There's like Twitch live streamers where they just gamble, right?

Speaker 1 And you watch them get into like a frenzy when they start to lose and they start to lose. And then it's always that thing.
The house wins because of odds.

Speaker 1 But another reason why the house wins is the house just has to get you to zero once. And then that's it.
You're done. There is no finish point for the house.

Speaker 2 Right. The house's bank is bigger.

Speaker 1 You're not going to get the house to zero, right? Yeah. You could.

Speaker 2 You could, but good luck. Well, maybe Michael Burry can.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of speculation about Michael Burry and the

Speaker 1 closing of the Scion fund.

Speaker 1 It is really interesting to read all the analysis of why he did that. Like people are like, wow, he just kind of like admitting defeat and apologizing to the investors.
Or that

Speaker 1 he really believes more than ever that this stuff is about to collapse. And then he'll be able to say he was completely out of the market.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like, like, I got out.

Speaker 1 For someone with a fund like that, there's no, he can't just like, I mean, he did short the housing market and then have to pay the monthly payments on all those credit default swaps that he had, which is what the movie's about.

Speaker 1 A lot of that, by the way, I've learned is like incredibly fictional. There's a lot of

Speaker 1 movie. Yeah, there's a lot of YouTube videos

Speaker 1 that are the people that the characters are based on. And they're all just saying, this is completely fabricated.
They go through like bit by bit and they say, this was not true or whatever.

Speaker 1 And it's interesting how much of that movie is presented as pure unadulterated truth and some of the scenes are just completely fictional.

Speaker 2 That happens with a lot of like based on a true story movies.

Speaker 2 And I guess it's good to remind ourselves every now and again how loose a term that can be. My favorite example of that is always

Speaker 2 a perfect storm. Do you remember that movie that was, was that George Clooney? They go out on, what happened is a fishing boat went out and never came back.
Right.

Speaker 1 That is the story the first five minutes that movie are based on the character

Speaker 2 everything else is pure supposition that's the one making a story based on a boat that never came back right right and so that like that it's it's so loose like yes we heard of a story one time and i thought to myself that would make a great movie yeah and i proceeded to write everything about that movie right once the boat leaves port that's it maybe some radio calls and then that's it that's it um but speaking of movies bernie that are entirely fantastical, Wicked 2 came out.

Speaker 2 Oh, buddy. It's set in records.
All right. This, let me, let me look up.

Speaker 1 I get nervous watching this cast. It's like, I know you're not supposed to say this stuff.
They're like, I even saw red carpet photos of Michelle Yeo.

Speaker 1 What is going on? Why are they all so skinny? And they all seem distraught.

Speaker 2 Oh, that. I thought you meant that they're all just like very

Speaker 2 whimsical. Yeah, or they're very like all like stressed out all the time.
Someone someone got scared by a helicopter uh yeah no

Speaker 2 wait wait wait what someone got scared by a helicopter was that a real thing flying over oh yeah yeah uh you know but uh as far as yes everyone in the cast seems

Speaker 2 uh very

Speaker 2 thin

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 2 is in some cases possibly concerningly so like you worry for their health right's like an action star i know i like Very well known for, well, absolutely everything all at once, like Crouching Tiger, hidden dragon uh but she's like she's done a lot of really incredible stuff really incredible action and there are photos of her on the red carpet um with extraordinarily prominent collarbone and like shoulder bones uh and so you you know you worry it's like it's not just

Speaker 1 everyone's the cavity that goes down it's just like i can see like joints on some of these people i know i know we're not supposed to body shame but it's like three people is a trend of something's going on.

Speaker 2 Well, I wonder if some of it,

Speaker 2 to some degree with this film in particular, is like if they're losing extra weight for costuming reasons, like there's like, you know, costumes can be pretty thick, right?

Speaker 2 Like they can, they can add a number

Speaker 2 like of like sizes in, right? Depending on like how thick like the padding is or like how they're formed, whatever.

Speaker 2 So I can see people make, like putting an effort to lose extra weight for the costume to then look like a normal size. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 Sure. Well, I mean, also, to be fair, we talk about this same thing about people bulking up to play parts that don't need it, right? Right.

Speaker 1 It's like just this incredible transformations that people are going through.

Speaker 1 It's like the volatility of Bitcoin, right? That's what we're criticizing here. It's like, why so much

Speaker 1 volatility in people's body shapes?

Speaker 2 My hope is that now that both parts of Wicked are out and the actors are onto other projects, everyone will sort of just go back.

Speaker 1 That'll be more concerning, not less concerning to me. Like, what were you doing? What

Speaker 2 about what it was about the set?

Speaker 1 Yeah, what was it about this project?

Speaker 2 Maybe it's all the singing and dancing.

Speaker 1 Did you ever hear this is like

Speaker 2 a lot of singing and dancing?

Speaker 1 Did you ever hear that the

Speaker 1 craft service, the lunch from Titanic, got

Speaker 1 spiked with PCP? Did you ever hear that story?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 Crazy story. There's an interview with

Speaker 2 maybe the Wicked Cast heard it and decided to stay away from

Speaker 1 Bill Paxton talking about it. Like he talks about the whole experience and like having it.
And then like, you know, it's a big crew. And then like 200 people show up in an emergency room.

Speaker 1 They've all like just had to deal with PCP and nobody like reacts to it the same way. And everything was crazy.
One of those weird Hollywood things. It's just completely insane.

Speaker 1 I don't think they ever figured out who did it.

Speaker 2 I don't, I don't, I don't know if I never heard about this.

Speaker 1 PCP, by the way. PCP.
Like of all the things to lace, it was like a stew that got laced with PCP.

Speaker 2 PCP spiked clam chowder.

Speaker 1 Clam chowder. Yeah, it's clam chowder.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Can you imagine being like, this clam chowder tastes a little bit off? And And you're like, well, it's clam chowder. It's fine.
And like, sure, it tastes a little fishy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And then it turns out there was more fishy to it than just the clam.

Speaker 1 You know what I feel? Do you know what I feel? I want to go out and fight 12 cops in the street. That's what I want to go do right now.

Speaker 2 Maybe it was to get everyone like warmed up.

Speaker 1 When was the last time you even heard about PCP? That was like a early 80s drug.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's definitely out of trend now. PCP.

Speaker 1 I don't even know what it is. All I knew is that you would act crazy.

Speaker 2 Punch through a windshield. No, I think PCP is a preservative that you put on deli meats.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right, right. There was, there was a trend.
I have a great voicemail about deli meat. I'll play it in a second.

Speaker 1 Were you of the era in the 80s where they would come and tell you about drugs in school and why you shouldn't do drugs?

Speaker 2 That was the DARE program where like a police officer would come in and tell you how it was going to ruin your life. But they all, they just kind of made it sound like really exotic and exciting.

Speaker 1 All the stories were awesome. All of them.
Like if I took PCP, I would be able to fight cops and like tip over a police car.

Speaker 2 I was like, what are you telling me? I'm like,

Speaker 1 that sounds awesome.

Speaker 2 Why would you?

Speaker 2 PCP is how you become a superhero.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, that sounds awful. Where do I get that so I can avoid it completely?

Speaker 2 And they would give us all t-shirts. Yeah, as I understand it, the DARE program was a complete failure.
It did not drop drug usage rates at all.

Speaker 1 I think you're right. I think they've actually gone and done a study showing how it had the opposite effect.

Speaker 2 Yeah, here we go. Here's an article from NPR: Just Say No didn't actually protect students from drugs.

Speaker 1 Magnify.

Speaker 1 Go figure. What did dare stand for? Stand for something.
Hold on. Drugs are really evil.

Speaker 2 Because the problem is the dare part of it became part of the slogan instead of the words that made up dare becoming being the slogan, right? It was dare to keep kids off drugs. And they didn't.

Speaker 2 I know dare meant something, but I couldn't tell you what it was. It just became dare.

Speaker 1 All the dare kids,

Speaker 1 the cops that were doing that program, after they were out of work, they went to go work security on the Titanic set.

Speaker 1 Should we play a voicemail? One of our first voicemails? Yes, let's play our first voicemail. So I had a question.
This is actually not, this is going to be kind of weird.

Speaker 1 I have to preface this a little bit. On the weekend chat, I was talking about how I bought a little meat slicer.
My first job when I was younger was delivering subs.

Speaker 1 for the Americans sub chain called Blimpy. That's what I did.
And I would make subs and we had one of the big things about Blimpy is that we would slice all of the meat fresh.

Speaker 1 So we had like a big ham ham and a big roast beef and we would just slice it fresh when you ordered your sandwich and cleaning that slicer was a nightmare. I bet.

Speaker 1 So now I have a slicer in our kitchen. It's not like that one.
It's not a massive one. It's a tiny little like cut off Amazon.

Speaker 2 We dedicated a room in the house to the slicer.

Speaker 1 The reason why I got this slicer is I'm trying to figure out like everyone says

Speaker 1 Deli meats are bad for you, but deli meats are meat, right? Like let me take a roast beef as an example because pork just gets confusing as shit. A roast beef is a chunk of a cow, right? Right.

Speaker 1 If I go to dinner and I have that like chunk of meat on my plate and I eat six or eight ounces of it or whatever, then that's reasonably healthy if I don't, you know, do that every single day.

Speaker 1 Somewhere in the process, if I slice it up, it becomes terrible, right?

Speaker 2 Yes. Well, Bernie, I think the magic word there is the process.

Speaker 1 This word process, this is what I'm getting at. It's like, what, can you tell me what process means? What does ultra-process mean? Is there anything between processed and ultra-processed?

Speaker 1 Is there like a mega-processed meeting? Can I get a micro-processed meat? And if it's like,

Speaker 1 let's say pork loin is an example. Pork loin is decently okay for you, right? It's meat.
Like there's some people who eat just like low carb and they eat just like pork loin or whatever.

Speaker 1 They eat this stuff and they're okay. But if I slice that up as ham, then suddenly it's bad for me.
Or does something happen between the pork loin stage and the pink ham loaf stage?

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, I think a couple things happen. But if you're talking about sliced ham in particular, I think

Speaker 2 the dream of food, right, is to eat as close to the original form of the food as possible, right? That's the minimal processing, right?

Speaker 2 Like if you can just pick a carrot out of the ground, brush the dirt off, and eat it, there's no processing, right?

Speaker 2 Like you've got the food in its original form with all the vitamins and stuff intact. And then every stage.

Speaker 1 Collecting pesticides, yes.

Speaker 2 Well, whatever. And then, you know, sure.
And also, there's like maybe manure enriching the soil. Like, there's a lot of stuff there that you got to deal with.
But you wash it off, you eat the thing.

Speaker 2 And then every step you take away from that, you lose maybe some of the nutrients, you know, and you lose a little bit of that. With something like meat, right?

Speaker 2 I assume that deli meat is a little bit like pre-shredded cheese. Right.

Speaker 2 You know, they say that if you're going to do like melting or whatever, don't use pre-shredded cheese because it's coated in wax to help keep it from sticking together, right?

Speaker 2 Like they went and they added something extra to it to make it more convenient, but that also like changes it a little.

Speaker 1 So if I get ham and I, what you're saying, and I put it in my slicer and I slice off my own ham, it should be so much better.

Speaker 2 Yes, I think you're good there.

Speaker 1 But even like, and we're in the UK, I don't think it's the fact of slicing.

Speaker 2 I think it's the pre-sliced stuff.

Speaker 3 What did they do to get it to get, it's gone through slicing and now it's in like a packaging and it's on a store shelf and it's going to last for a couple of weeks how is that possible here's it here well let me see so we had a nurse call in uh to the voicemail uh this is pete and he this is what he had to say about deli meat in particular after the sponsor chat good morning this is peter or super pete on the patreon following up on your deli meat question from the q a uh the reason deli meat is considered less healthy than its whole counterpart is usually in the processing it takes a lot of sodium so they're worried about those sodium levels and the high blood pressure that can follow they're also worried about nitrites and nitrates and their possible carcinogenic link.

Speaker 3 Now, I'm not a dietitian, I'm a nurse. The reason I kind of know about this is the blood pressure piece and also the guidance for pregnancies regarding those.

Speaker 1 Okay, no, yeah, no, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're not supposed to eat deli meats while pregnant because there's a risk of Listeria. I guess when you're pregnant, you're really vulnerable to like food poisoning, specifically Listeria.

Speaker 2 That's

Speaker 1 also why you're not supposed to have sushi. He mentioned some bacteria.
I don't know if it was Listeria

Speaker 1 in his longer voicemail. We trimmed that a little bit.
Wasn't Lysteria the the one that Bluebell got? Yes.

Speaker 1 They got hit by?

Speaker 2 Yes. The Bluebell, which is, is that a Texas brand of ice cream?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Brand Texas, baby.

Speaker 2 And it almost shut the brand down because they had a Lysteria outbreak.

Speaker 1 That and the fucking weirdos who were on social media going into Bluebell freezer cases, opening them, licking them, and then putting them back. What's wrong with people, dude?

Speaker 1 What's wrong with people? It's social media, right?

Speaker 2 Yes. It's either.

Speaker 1 You know, I would say that these people always existed. We just didn't see them.
But that doesn't explain why the president's calling for someone's death on social media. That's

Speaker 1 we shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be here.
That's like, there's no step that we, like, we all took a step one after the other that leads to this destination.

Speaker 2 No, I think we're all in agreement that social media was a bad choice that we all made. That was like, that's us gambling and losing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's us gambling and losing. And then not being able to stop either.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like

Speaker 2 we went for like the dopamine hits or the rush or whatever, and now we're too far gone.

Speaker 1 We got another email. This is from our self-proclaimed only Gen Z listener.

Speaker 1 Here's what they had to say on our voicemail. This is Ethan.

Speaker 4 But I did have one question for you guys.

Speaker 3 If you could get rid of one deli meat,

Speaker 4 one deli meat, just banish it from the face of the earth. Why do you hate that deli meat? Other than bologna?

Speaker 2 What do you mean, other than bologna?

Speaker 1 Why do you call it bologna?

Speaker 2 Like that would be a good one. Ethan, you can't accept baloney.
Bologna is like the deli meat to get rid of.

Speaker 1 Also, there's a lot of bologna derivatives. I know immediately what mine would be.
Okay, go ahead. Are you familiar with olive loaf? I don't even know if they make olive loaf anymore.

Speaker 2 What is it? Like look up. Is it like Grand Up Olives?

Speaker 1 No, no, no. Look up Oscar Meyer

Speaker 1 olive loaf. It was like ham

Speaker 1 with olives embedded in it.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's that's the everything that you would hate.

Speaker 1 It makes me so uneasy to look at it.

Speaker 2 It looks like ham got a disease.

Speaker 1 If you gave like on the red carpet at a wicked premiere, gave everyone like olive loaf,

Speaker 1 i would check into a clinic like that day it would be too much for me to handle too much

Speaker 1 gross no i've uh i would get rid of the listeria maybe right get rid of that just get rid of the processing is it fair for me to say that if i get something from a store it already qualifies as processed yes but what you want i mean so tell me the way that we live

Speaker 2 here the way that we live now a lot of things are processed that's just the way it is but reducing or minimizing the process the processing as much as you can, that's what you want to do, right?

Speaker 2 You can't tell me. So we got a ham from the store.
Although I find ham very confusing since we moved to the UK because I haven't been able to find it cooked, right?

Speaker 2 In the in the U.S., I normally just go into the store and I buy a ham and it's already been cured. It's already cooked.
You just take it home and you can slice it, right?

Speaker 2 And here, I haven't been able to find that. I'm told that it is available, that it exists, but I haven't been able to find it.
So I got a ham joint or a gamon joint

Speaker 2 from the store and cooked it ourselves.

Speaker 2 And it came out and it was delicious, put it on the slicer, sliced it up. But you can't tell me that that tasted exactly the same as deli ham.
It tasted different.

Speaker 1 Well, first of all, we're not going to get those little like razor thin slices, right?

Speaker 2 Right. But even so, like the taste and the texture, they were different than deli ham.

Speaker 1 Close enough for me, I don't care. As long as I know that that's okay, that that's good.

Speaker 1 To me, me, is there a single goddamn pork product on the planet that just doesn't have salt embedded all the way through it? Why? What is the deal with salt and pork?

Speaker 2 Well, look, they're finding ways to add extra salt if they're embedding olives in them.

Speaker 1 Like, if I have a steak, I know it's just meat, it's the beef, and that's it.

Speaker 1 I don't feel like I can buy anything that's pork, bacon, pork loin, whatever, and it's ham, it's gonna have some kind of salt brine on it yeah

Speaker 2 i don't know why pork in particular seems to be so brined right like it seems to be like just everyone expects it to be salty i just should stop eating pork looking at this olive loaf you know what it looks like it belongs on a plate with like one of those weird elaborate like what is it 60s jello molds right right where they were there's there's like a bunch of slices of olive loaf bologna inside like embedded in green gelatin right they they they found ways to put like ground beef inside of a jello mold.

Speaker 2 It looks, yeah, I don't understand that. There's, I love gelatin.
Uh, I know that it's really good for you. Uh, you know, it has collagen and vitamins and stuff in it.
And it's fun.

Speaker 2 The kids love a good gelatin, uh, but I don't understand that era's obsession with putting every food imaginable in a jello or like in some kind of like gelatin mold.

Speaker 2 It's one of those things that it's like, they didn't stop to ask if they should, they just asked if they could.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Once they had had the mold, then everything became moldable.

Speaker 1 Let's just put all the moldable foods together. That's it.

Speaker 2 Maybe, and maybe

Speaker 2 the obsession with deli meats in the perfect cut shapes all came from jelly molds.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm going to blame. Do you have a real answer to what deli meat would you get rid of?

Speaker 2 Let's see. Have you ever seen head cheese?

Speaker 1 That's another adventure you can look up. Oscar Meyer head cheese.

Speaker 2 Oh, that sounds awful.

Speaker 1 Well, you would be right. It sounds awful, and the image is awful, too.
It's terrible.

Speaker 2 When I look at that olive loaf, I get get that what's that thing where people have a fear of a lot of holes oh uh trip trypophobia tripop yeah i think that sounds like the fear of turkeys like falling falling asleep after thanksgiving tryptophanophobia by the way we haven't talked about thanksgiving at all because we have like it's not even a thing for us like are you thinking that thursday is thanksgiving no no no it's how un-american have we become i know well it's really weird here because we're not getting any of the like local thanksgiving messaging right no one's reminding us that thanksgiving is coming up and we need to get our turkey into the fridge like that's just not a thing here.

Speaker 2 We're not seeing anything about it. The stores are all 100% in on Christmas.
And

Speaker 2 there's no one going like, hey, are you an American? Would you like to celebrate your freedom from us

Speaker 1 this week? The king hasn't returned any of the colonies back to any turkeys. Like that would be the British equivalent of that, you know?

Speaker 2 Pardoning a colony for the year.

Speaker 1 I got to say, too, like the pardoning of turkeys on Thanksgiving is now not funny anymore. It's like we're too far along in like presidents pardoning.

Speaker 1 Like I think there was prior to the turn of the century, there was like one pardon or two parts. So the turkey thing became funny, but now it's not funny.

Speaker 2 No, too, too many pardons and

Speaker 2 not enough of them are turkeys. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the president will pardon the turkey and then social media will immediately cancel the turkey and demand for all the turkey files to be released.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 are you aware of the turkey's behavior on the wicket set?

Speaker 1 I am not at all aware of it at all.

Speaker 1 I can tell you where he wasn't. He wasn't being served

Speaker 1 at lunch. They had just purely olive loaf and head cheese.

Speaker 1 Gross. Hey, it's part of the diet plan, pal.
So what is one you would remove?

Speaker 2 Do you have one?

Speaker 2 Spam? No, I like spam.

Speaker 2 I actually think spam gets a bad rap.

Speaker 1 Actually, I don't like it, but I appreciate that other people like it. Like, they love it in Hawaii and they love it in Korea.
They love spam.

Speaker 2 Do they love it in Korea? Really? I was not aware of that. I mean, I've heard about it a lot in like Hawaiian cuisine, but I hadn't heard about it in Korean cuisine.

Speaker 1 Oh, so you I could watch Korean street food videos all day long. You look up this.
Okay. This is crazy.
It's not Korea. It's Japan.

Speaker 1 There was a guy who did a video about a viral cream sandwich that's in Japan.

Speaker 2 That sounds like a lot of processing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. And it's, by the way, it starts, the first ingredient is milk bread.
I don't know what milk bread is, but I immediately love what it does.

Speaker 1 It's incredible.

Speaker 2 You're on a flight to Japan right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, exactly. We want to go try this out.

Speaker 2 So we'll post this video in the link dump and we'll send it to the Wicked Cast.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, it looks so good. Do you remember we did one of these things because we were going to visit London for some reason?

Speaker 1 I think we had a stop over there if we decided to stay there for a day or two. And we did a croissant crawl and did all like the viral croissant cracks.

Speaker 2 Oh, or you have like the, yeah, there's where it's like a croissant donut. That was a cronut?

Speaker 1 I remember that. Yeah.
No, no, it was kind of like cronut inspired.

Speaker 2 A donant.

Speaker 1 Do you remember the croissant cubes?

Speaker 2 I do, yeah.

Speaker 1 They were made by like the Borg.

Speaker 1 And you had to be there at 10 a.m. and line up with all the fucking rubes who were getting these things.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's

Speaker 2 a couple of like viral, you get these viral food trends where just all of a sudden it's impossible to get the things.

Speaker 2 One that we tried really, really hard to get in on that was difficult in Austin was the Japanese fluffy pancake. Oh, right.

Speaker 2 And we ended up finding one brunch place in Austin that would serve this fluffy pancake. We took Teddy, you remember?

Speaker 2 It was Swift's Attic, which I don't even know if, I don't know if Swift's Attic is still still around.

Speaker 2 I know that they don't do the fluffy pancake anymore because they only made so many per day because they take a lot of extra effort.

Speaker 2 Like, you have to go and whip up egg whites and all that and then fold them back in.

Speaker 1 It's this whole process. By the way, they look amazing when you see them in videos.
They are 100% eggs disguised as pancakes. They are.

Speaker 2 They're getting you your protein.

Speaker 1 They're like souffles, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 They look like little fluffy clouds. They're just eggs.
They're

Speaker 2 big and they go and they go pop, bop, pop, bop, pop when you pat them.

Speaker 1 You had a Japanese cheesecake, though, that you still talk about.

Speaker 2 Oh, that was in Sydney.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we were there for RTX.

Speaker 2 It was incredible. Like, it was very similarly big and fluffy, and you can tell someone whipped up the egg whites somewhere in the process.

Speaker 1 It had like Uncle Something was the name, and they would put a little brand on it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they had a little face. It was like cheesecake.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's so good. But these Korean street food videos, they're amazing.
So you don't have one. Let me just ask you in closing here, real quick, because we're like over 30 minutes at this point.

Speaker 1 Is there anything that's really terrible that you love? Like, there are people out there who

Speaker 1 would love olive loaf, and I was was like, it's the worst thing. I have a couple things that are like that.

Speaker 2 No, there's loads of things. One is craft mac and cheese.
Like, when I'm, I make it for the kids because they love it.

Speaker 2 And as I'm like pouring the cheese powder into the pan to mix it in, I'm like, what are you doing? You know, you know, this is bad. You know, this is not a nutritious meal that you're making.

Speaker 2 And then I take a little bite to test it and I go, oh, that's so good. Yeah.
That's so good. And like, all, like, all my cares and worries about the nutrition, they just float out the window.

Speaker 1 Yeah, mine would be in the vein vein of both olive loaf and craft macaroni and cheese. Oscar Meyer also made ham and cheese slices.
What?

Speaker 1 I don't know if they make it anymore, but it was ham with like little, look at little dots of cheese in the ham.

Speaker 1 And I would just, when I was a kid, I would, my mom would buy that for me and I would put it in a frying pan and fry it and then put it on a sandwich. And I absolutely loved it.

Speaker 1 It had to be one of the worst abominations ever made.

Speaker 2 There's a point at which like convenience goes too far.

Speaker 2 Another one that I feel did that in a similar vein was, you know, you get the like, was it Welch's that where you could have peanut butter and jelly in the same jar?

Speaker 2 Like it was like stripes of jelly next to stripes of peanut butter.

Speaker 2 And then you would just what, put to put the knife in and just get a whole knife full or spoonful of this mixed up peanut butter jelly and just it on your bread. And there you go.

Speaker 2 You've got an easy sample. It's too much.

Speaker 1 applying what we have learned today Ashley I think that might be processed

Speaker 2 and what they had to do to like each of those things to make them cohabitate in that jar took them even further away from the processed foods that they already were right like in order to make them combine and live together they have to both be different than what they started as they're not it's not peanut butter and jelly it's inspired bias yes it's a it's like when you have to say it's a peanut butter jelly flavored food that's what that is now.

Speaker 1 With notes of benzene.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not a fool. At least I don't think I'm a fool.
I know when something's processed. What I'm saying is, how do I get to the unprocessed part? How do I get there?

Speaker 1 Am I just like, do I got to go out in a field and chew on a cow?

Speaker 2 Is that what I got to do? I think here's what you do. You ask yourself if what you're about to eat is convenient.
And if the answer is yes, then it was probably processed.

Speaker 1 I think what I do is look at the ingredients. Right.
And if there's three ingredients or more, I'm done. Like I gotta do it.

Speaker 1 You're out. Look, I do feel like you're not.

Speaker 2 If you take the ham and you cook the ham and you slice the ham, you're fine, right?

Speaker 2 If they did all that stuff for you, not fine.

Speaker 1 Right. But it's like in the case of ham, it's pork and then always salt and water, right? Almost always it's going to be that.
Let me just get the pork. Is pork without salt just really terrible?

Speaker 1 And they've been hiding it this whole time?

Speaker 2 They've been hiding behind the brine.

Speaker 1 Another thing that I would eat. which is probably one of the worst things on the planet.
This is not an ad is there was this thing called, they probably still have it. It looks like it's called

Speaker 1 Underwood. It's like deviled ham.
It comes in a little can. It's also wildly expensive.
A tiny little can is like four or five bucks. That was like when I was buying it before inflation.

Speaker 1 And then you open it. It looks like an army ration when you take it out of the wrapper.
It's a little can. And then you open it.
It's like diced

Speaker 1 salted ham in a can.

Speaker 1 When you open it and smell it, it's basically cat food.

Speaker 1 Wow that the humans can eat.

Speaker 1 They sell

Speaker 1 There's also a chicken version of it. It's got to be so salty.
Like, if you had that on a cracker with easy cheese, you would immediately dehydrate. You would desiccate on the spot.

Speaker 2 You know that's being served with elaborate gelatin, right?

Speaker 1 Right, you would. And then you would eat that.
And then the casting director for Wicked 3 would go, hey, what are you up to?

Speaker 1 Do you want to read for us?

Speaker 2 All right. I'm going to go ahead and cut us off there.
All right. Because

Speaker 2 I've lost all my appetite for now several days. So, I would like to say a big thank you to Ryan Jugan and Mitchell Dreyer.
Thank you both so much for sponsoring this deli-themed episode of our show

Speaker 2 at patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

Speaker 1 All right, well, that does it for us today, November 25th, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.