Hello, hello. Hey, Marina. What's up? Today, I wanted to start with an email that we got as a team earlier this year. I do think it's fair to say that it immediately sort of became like show lore. Do you remember this? Oh, yeah. Of course I do. It came in with the subject line tasting the forbidden fruit. In the world of emails that I leave unread, that one's not getting unread.

And in fact, I actually called this listener up.

Chuckie 1-2-1-2.

There we go.

This is Hussain El Gridley himself, penman of tasting the forbidden fruit.

His email started with a story.

About a year ago now, a friend of mine was speaking at a workshop in Costa Rica.

And she said to me, hey, would you like to come down for vacation for a few days afterwards?

So, Hussein was in Costa Rica.

One afternoon, he and his friend are coming back from lunch, walking down the beach.

And while we're walking back,

she picks a little apple up off the beach and hands it to me. I got to ask Nate, you're in this

moment. You have this apple handed to you. Are you eating it? No, I don't eat strange fruits.

That is not something I do. Well, Hussein had a very different response. I have the tiniest, tiniest taste. I taste the flesh and then I spit it out

and throw the apple back on the beach. He told me it tasted entirely unremarkable. Like if he saw

these apples at a grocery store, you wouldn't buy them. So he didn't think much about it. Five, maybe

ten minutes later, I look at her and I say, hey, we ate the same thing for lunch.

Do you have this peppery feeling in the back of your mouth?

And she looks at me and says, no.

Uh-oh.

So another ten, twenty minutes later, the peppery feeling has spread.

It's now in the back of my mouth.

...