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What's your all -time favorite mention of Jose Cuervo in a song?
So there are these border ballads that were written during the Prohibition era in the 1920s that were written all along the Rio Grande Valley.
And many of them are songs that the smugglers would sing to sort of entertain themselves as they were smuggling huge loads of tequila on the backs of donkeys across the brush country of Texas.
There are a number of those songs that mention Jose Cuervo by name.
So it sort of makes you think of Jose Cuervo as sort of like a folk hero.
Absolutely. You know, I love this vision of these guys out there in the moonlight with a mule train loaded with tequilas singing songs about Jose Cuervo as they make their way towards San Antonio to sell to the speakeasies there.
Jose Cuervo, you are a friend of mine I like to drink it with a little salt and lime This is the Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Jose Cuervo is the best -selling tequila brand in the world.
It's been at the top for most of the last hundred -plus years.
And yet, little is known about Jose Cuervo the person.
Yes, he was a real guy.
In the early 1900s, he revolutionized the tequila industry in Mexico, all while navigating bloody business feuds and a nation at war against itself.
The reason people don't know a whole lot about Jose Cuervo?
Many key documents about his life are very hard to find.
During the Mexican Revolution, public records, private records were frequently raided and destroyed in order to get rid of any documentation of bribes that had been demanded and paid by revolutionaries.
And so all of the families had a practice of keeping these records in secure places and not sharing them with anyone.
This is Ted Genovese, a journalist, author, and professor at the University of Tulsa.
Ted specializes in unearthing hidden stories of the intersection of food, agriculture, and business.
One of his books is about a fifth -generation family farm in Nebraska.
Another is about the meatpacking industry in the Midwest. Now he's got a new one out this week called Tequila Wars, Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.
It's an epic story that includes revolution, generational rivalries, and the creation of a billion -dollar liquor brand.
But this was not an easy story for Ted to track down.
As you heard, a lot of the documents about Jose Cuervo's life and work have been destroyed, either during the violence of the Mexican Revolution or to conceal certain activities.
What little remains is locked away in the family's archives.
And Cuervo didn't leave much of a paper trail to begin with.
Cuervo had this tendency to kind of keep a low profile, to try to stay out of the newspapers, stay out of public view and work behind the scenes.
That also became a key way that he survived, especially through the period of the Revolution, when many of his friends and business partners did not survive.
It kept him from being put in front of a firing squad, but it makes him a really challenging subject to research. You spent 12 years working on this book.
Yeah. You're rubbing your forehead as you say that, as if you're like, wow, Jay, I hadn't actually counted it up.
Well, if somebody had told me that it was going to take 12 years, I wouldn't have started on it.
I would have chosen a different project.
Well, that's true with, I think, a lot of big projects and work in life.
Exactly, yeah. But there must have been something compelling about Jose Cuervo's story that kept you going when it became a slog.
Like, what was so compelling about this story?
I had initially set out thinking that Jose Cuervo was somebody who had been in a position where he was just trying to survive the revolution, that he was trying to survive a tumultuous period and and find a way to kind of play defense what became clear over time was that he was a really key player and that though he was often not in the public eye he was very important in back rooms and brokering deals and he was somebody who was very much a power broker as well as a business tycoon and so showing how he influenced him and not just how he was influenced by that world, you know, it just kept me
constantly interested in what I was finding.
The story starts centuries ago with Jose's great -great -grandfather, who owns a small plot of land in Mexico's Tequila Valley, which is now in the state of Jalisco.
He uses the land to distill agave plants, making a brandy called vino mezcal.
Now, this drink is made all over the country, but the best stuff comes from the Tequila Valley, and so it eventually becomes called tequila.
That's how the beverage we know today got its name.
Anyway, in the 1870s, Jose's father and uncle take over the business, and they have very different approaches from each other.
Jose's father, he's all about growing the business, building partnerships, forming alliances.
Jose's uncle? One of his competition tools was to go out and burn the distilleries of competitors, so that, But, you know, that'll that'll do it.
Yeah, it definitely helped reduce the competition in the market.
Right. So, yeah, I mean, and that's the thing is that it's a lot of the story of the family and between the families that there's always this push and pull between people who are looking to just kind of build by by making alliances and political influence and and slowly building.
And then there's always somebody who's like, we should just go kill those guys who we're feuding with.
This is the classic Stringer Bell, Avon, Barksdale split.
It absolutely is. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like, are we going to run a business?
Are we going to go to war?
That's it. And that pendulum swings.
Anytime you see a moment where the political order breaks down, where the social order breaks down, it also means that everything in business is in upheaval.
And that creates an opportunity for violence.
And it also means that the whole order may flip on its head.
And so everyone becomes much more sort of on edge and, you know, gun at the ready.
In 1880, Jose's uncle dies and Jose's father takes over the whole business.
But when Jose turns 18, his father also dies.
The business is in a lot of debt.
The family has to sell it.
And Jose Cuervo, as a young man who had been expecting to sort of easily ascend to this position where he would be one of the captains of the tequila industry, history instead found that he was orphaned and landless and still drowning in debt.
Jose gets a job with his great -uncle, Jesus Flores, who has agave estates and distilleries in Tequila and Guadalajara, which is the capital of Jalisco.
Jose works his way up until he's practically running the place.
By the time he's 30, his uncle Jesus is in his 70s and worried about who's going to take over when he's gone.
Now, Uncle Jesus is married to a much younger woman named Ana.
They don't have any kids.
As the story goes, he was on his deathbed in Guadalajara looking out the window at the skyline of Guadalajara and calls his wife to his bedside and says, you know, I'm at death's door.
When I actually go, Jose Cuervo would make a fine husband and he could run the business and carry this on.
So she has that very much in her mind that that's that that's how things will go.
The thing that's kind of funny is that the only person who was not informed of all of this is Jose Cuervo.
So the uncle dies, leaves the fortune and the business to his wife at first. So now she is now one of the wealthiest people in Mexico.
That's correct. Then she loops in Jose on the plan.
Yes. She calls him in and says what?
You should be in charge, but we have to get married.
Ana knows that having a woman run the business isn't really an option at the time.
She could be involved, but she needs a husband out front.
And Jose is reluctant.
He is in so many ways in his life, he's cautious.
And he says, you know, I need a little time to think about this.
I'm sure, especially then, it would have been rare for a woman to propose marriage to a man.
So that was awesome.
But she is rich and powerful.
She owns the company that's in his family's line.
She's also sort of like known throughout the region to be very beautiful.
Like, it seems like there's a lot of things going here.
Maybe not the romance yet, but in prior centuries, marriages were often more about business than about love.
Absolutely. And so she sees this as a sensible decision.
Jose goes back to tequila and goes back to running the distillery and takes a while.
He's still not getting back to her.
Come on, Jose, get it together.
So she summons him back to Guadalajara, and it's recorded by a very close friend of hers that they had this exchange where she brought him in and said, look, you said you wanted to think about it, but you've been really busy with the business.
You haven't had time to think about it, so I've thought about it for both of us.
And the justice of the peace walks in, Bible in hand.
Door opens and a guy walks in holding a Bible.
Exactly so. And marries them on the spot.
And that is when Jose Cuervo became in charge of the whole family's tequila business.
Exactly so, yeah. And what would his relationship with Ana be over the years?
I mean, she certainly seems like a pretty shrewd and capable person.
What was her role as he took over the business?
Yeah, well, she is much more gregarious than he is.
I mean, I think that story shows that she was outgoing and extremely confident.
And so where Jose was the one who was kind of running the business and making all of the kind of political decisions and seeing the technological opportunities, she was the one who was building the social connections and bringing together the people that they needed from the upper class in Guadalajara and later in Mexico City to establish this kind of political clout that they needed for carrying out some of Jose's ideas.
So that partnership was really a close one, and both parts of that relationship were really important.
Jose takes over the business operations and quickly makes a key decision.
Around this time, there's a big push internationally for food safety.
The Mexican government says from now on, all tequila has to be sold in sealed bottles instead of in barrels, which are more susceptible to being adulterated.
And whereas barrels were sold to cantinas, bottles can be sold directly to consumers.
So companies need to distinguish themselves.
themselves. Cuervo makes the decision to say, I'm putting my name on this product, and I'm the name behind this brand.
And that's when Jose Cuervo, the tequila brand, was born.
Jose starts growing the business, lobbying the government to build railroads and a train station in tequila, which allows him to ship his product across the country.
Now, this wasn't just good for his company.
It also transformed the town of tequila itself.
It was sold as like, yeah, the railroad's going to come to town.
It's going to be here twice a day.
You'll be able to get back and forth to Guadalajara.
And that also meant that there were certain necessities for the town, that there was a city clock that was installed so that everyone would know what time it was and be able to be at the platform on time.
And there was a trolley that was built that would carry people from the train station to the central plaza.
And so what Cuervo was trying to do was make everyone see this as an era of modernization and opportunity and emphasize, you know, this is also going to connect us to all of these markets.
Yes, I'm going to profit, but it's also going to mean a lot more jobs.
It's going to be more prosperity for the whole town.
And everybody went for that.
At this time, Cuervo is producing 350 ,000 barrels of tequila a year, which means millions of bottles a year.
They're at the top of the industry.
Only the Sousa family is close.
But José wanted more.
more. Cuervo was not just, you know, the largest tequila maker.
He was the largest maker of intoxicating beverages in Mexico and had his eye very much on expanding into a European market and into the American market.
Places where there were deeper pockets and people were willing to pay for something that was exotic and seen as a kind of luxury item.
So he was absolutely building an empire, and it was all going extremely well.
It's just that it happens that it lands exactly at the moment that the country's unraveling.
Coming up, the Mexican revolution comes for Jose Cuervo, and he has to figure out not only how to keep his business afloat, but how to stay alive.
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Welcome back to The Sporkful.
I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, we explore a century -old cookie rivalry between Oreo and Hydrox.
Nowadays, Hydrox cookies are known as a cheap knockoff of Oreos, but did you know that Hydrox actually came first?
I talked with reporter Mackenzie Martin about the Kansas City origins of Hydrox, which all started with a businessman named Jacob Luce who created the Luce Wiles Biscuit Company.
So Luce Wiles sees chocolate trending, and in 1908 they do something no one has done before.
They put two crisp, bitter dark chocolate wafers around a layer of sweet vanilla cream and they call it Hydrox, America's first chocolate sandwich cookie.
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Hydrox isn't intended to be an everyday cookie.
It's a special event billed as the aristocrat of cookies.
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Mackenzie tells us why Oreo came out on top and Hydrox got banished to obscurity.
Plus, I sample my first Hydrox.
This episode is a lot of fun.
It's a great story.
Check it out wherever you got this one.
All right, back to my conversation with Ted Genovese, whose new book is Tequila Wars, Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.
Since Jose Cuervo was a little kid in the 1870s, Mexico had been ruled by a dictator, dictator Porfirio Diaz.
The country's constitution had term limits for president, but Diaz ignored the ban on running again and kept getting reelected in sham elections full of fraud and intimidation.
The Cuervo family, now they had cozied up to Diaz for decades.
It was the only way for their business to survive.
But by 1909, the country was on the brink of a revolution.
The Mexican people wanted Diaz out.
It was a really kind of perilous moment in the history Because Diaz had actually promised not to run again in 1910, and then he did.
There was a lot of discontent about the fact that he was going to hold on to power.
And that's really the moment that Cuervo said, I've got to step forward into politics and try to make sure that Diaz remains in control, so that there's not, you know, a bloody revolution to overthrow him.
but also let people know that there is reform coming, that there is change happening, that this is not just more of the same.
We hear you, we're going to address those issues.
And that required him to be involved.
So he's kind of trying to play both sides.
Exactly, for sure. Stay friends with the dictator while showing the revolutionaries that he's working on stuff that's going to make them happy.
Yes. And am I correct in assuming that he was playing both sides, basically because really what he was focused on was his business.
Absolutely, yeah. And he thought that that was the best way to help his business to survive and to grow.
Exactly. Yeah, the thing you want is stability.
You see it now that the main thing that the people in business want is a kind of predictable marketplace.
And so for Cuervo, he understood, especially at this moment, you know, they had finally gotten the railroad in 1909.
And so he's finally getting his product to market in large quantities.
He's finally starting to get access to the U .S. The last thing he wants is a bloody revolution that tears the country apart and leaves him without the opportunity to capitalize.
But change comes too quickly for Jose to manage.
Diaz, the dictator, is forced out.
And suddenly there are rival revolutionary factions fighting for control of the country.
The main roads in and out of Tequila are taken over by militias.
And Jose is not the only distiller in town.
So this is a big problem for all of them.
All of tequila found itself targeted multiple times.
Caught in the crossfire because they happen to be the town that's on this road that's crucial in these battles.
Yes. And, you know, they're filled with tequila.
So that makes them appealing to revolutionary troops who are moving along there.
Also, like being a place where there's a lot of tequila is not the best way to reduce fighting.
It's really not. Like barrels and barrels of tequila don't tend to pacify armies.
And in fact, they had a tendency when they showed up to stick around for a while because they kind of liked this as a base of operations.
Yeah, they were like, all right, yeah, we need an extra day to rest here.
Exactly. There were other factors that put a target on Jose and the other tequila makers.
They had private armies to protect their distilleries, so the revolutionaries wanted those weapons, as well as the cash the companies had on hand.
And these revolutionaries were very skeptical of Jose Cuervo himself.
He'd been playing all sides.
They suspected he wasn't really on their side.
One of the really big attacks that's dramatic hits the town of Tequila on the night of Cuervo's birthday in October of 1913.
And it's especially dramatic because he's in town, all of the other tequila makers are in town because they're celebrating his birthday.
So they're all gathered at his home in the courtyard of his home celebrating when they get word that the revolutionaries are just outside of town and on their way.
And so everyone mobilizes to try to defend the town, but then also there's a great effort to get the women and children together.
And it culminates with the town being overtaken by the revolutionaries and they raid all of the distilleries.
The thing that is amazing about Cuervo during the revolution, somehow or another, he always manages to just kind of slip out the back door quietly whenever that moment arrives.
He's very good at just escaping at the last minute.
That night, as the revolutionary forces close in, Jose makes a run for it.
He's afraid that spies are watching, and so he hops from rooftop to rooftop, all down the block, you know, takes the gutter pipe down to the street level, and makes his way to a nephew's home where he borrows his horse and rides out into the countryside.
He goes into this canyon in the mountains north of Tequila where he hunkers down in this sort of cluster of huts that are all along this mountain stream.
I feel like this should be a movie.
I completely agree.
The film rights are available.
Yeah. So Jose is hiding out in the mountains, but he's not alone.
all the other top tequila makers, his rivals in business join him there, including his closest competitor, Eladio Souza.
Next time you're at the liquor store, you see a bottle of Jose Cuervo next to a bottle of Souza tequila.
Imagine these two men, Jose Cuervo and Eladio Souza, hiding together in mud huts outside the town of Tequila, waiting for months to see what happens with the revolution.
Finally, they get word that things have calmed down, the revolutionary forces have taken control of Jalisco and there's some stability.
Cuervo, Souza, and the other tequila makers think it's safe to come back and start their businesses up again.
And it's just a matter of weeks before Cuervo is arrested and is put on trial for treason.
And once again, it's exactly the same charge as before, that he wasn't enough of a supporter of the revolutionary cause and that what this proves is that he was actually an enemy of the revolution.
All these different witnesses were called, testifying to the things that Cuervo had done for or against the revolution.
But in the end, it's Eladio Sousa, his greatest competitor, who takes the stand and says, I know that Jose Cuervo has to be in favor of the revolution because when the revolutionary forces came into tequila and were going up and down the row of distilleries, we all gave them all the money we had.
And we were supporters of the revolution.
These revolutionaries, they weren't bandits, they weren't thieves.
That would be unconstitutional and illegal.
That would make this whole revolution illegitimate.
So these had to have been legal payments that were given in support of the revolution, and no one gave more than Jose Cuervo.
And they're trapped.
They either have to admit that they were stealing that money from Cuervo, or they have to let him go.
So that sort of forces the judge and jury to say, yes, he must be a supporter of the revolution because he gave all this money, or if you're going to say he wasn't a supporter of the revolution, then what you're saying is that money was stolen from him, which would be wrong and illegal.
And so he kind of put them in, interesting, so he put them in a bit of a bind.
Yes. And so they release him.
It's this amazing thing that it is this mental calculation that Cuervo's great competitor makes, and he saves him.
I mean, he saves him from years in prison or worse.
To me, that's one of the most remarkable ironies in the whole thing is that this family that he had been business competitors with and struggling with for so many years and then would struggle with again, that in that kind of key moment, there was a recognition of their kind of shared fate.
But for Eladio Souza, it wasn't just the power of friendship that compelled him to help Jose Cuervo.
Something else was going on behind the scenes.
Back when they were hiding in the mountains, Jose proposed a plan to Souza and the other tequila makers.
And what he says is basically, look, all of our distilleries have been hit with cannon fire, they've been burned, our fields have been burned, the railroads have been, you know, blown up in various places.
What we're going to have to do to get back on our feet is work together.
And so what he proposes is that they form what at that early stage is called a union of tequila makers.
And the idea was just if you've got a field that has agave and I've got a distillery that's up and running, we'll share resources and produce that tequila and share the profits.
But over time, what Cuervo started talking about was, well, we're also going to have to control the distribution lines.
We're going to have to have a private militia that protects our properties and that we're all going to share in the costs of that.
And we're all going to agree that we kind of stake out territory.
and Cuervo had a nephew who was the German consul in Guadalajara and so he had gotten this concept from his nephew, this idea of collaborating to get through difficult times.
And this was all a German business cooperative model and the German word for this was cartel.
In other words, this right here is the first known Mexican cartel.
With an agreement in place, the tequila makers go about rebuilding their businesses.
In 1919, about six years after first fleeing to the mountains, they're back up and running and they sense a big opportunity because the U .S. is about to enter prohibition.
But there's a one -month window before it goes into effect.
And because people in the U .S. know that a ban on booze is coming, they are very eager to stockpile.
And what Cuervo recognizes is there's this huge market for tequila just across the line.
If we can just make our tequila in high volume and get it to the border, we will be able to recover as an industry.
And so they stake out their territory, they stake out their trade routes, and they actually sign a couple of different cartel agreements.
The Souses had the territory to the east, the Cuervos had the territory to the west. And what Cuervo asked out of the government was, hey, well, just get rid of the export taxes for us for this very short period of time.
And he went together with Eladio Sousa to lobby the president directly.
It was like, let us just have this short window of time.
We will send all of this product across the border, and it'll make a ton of money that'll flow back into the economy, and it'll be good for Mexico?
The president said no. And so they did it anyway.
But what they started doing was keeping two sets of books, one where they showed actual export numbers that they kept privately for themselves.
You ask where a secret archive comes from, that's one place.
And also they had a second second set of books that they showed to the government.
And so this is, to my mind, really the moment where this moves to truly being this criminal enterprise that they were engaged in for the rest of prohibition.
So with the help of this cartel arrangement and prohibition in the U .S. and all these things, he's finally clawed his way back.
Things are looking pretty good.
The cartel agreement expires.
When the cartel agreement expires, it seems like it was going well.
Why Why wouldn't they just all renew it right away?
Well, when things are going really well, everyone starts to think that maybe they deserve more than everybody else, right?
And one of the things that was happening with this new presidential election was that there were also elections being held at the state and local level.
And so there was an effort by the Cuervos and Sousas both to try to run candidates in in the town of Tequila, in Guadalajara for governor, and exert their influence in Mexico City.
And they're trying to get a business advantage.
And instead of renewing the agreement, on both sides started to think that they were recovered enough, that there was enough money that they had made that they could take over the whole market now and squeeze out their competitors.
They were getting cocky.
Yes. Greedy, too. Right.
Right. Greedy, right.
Right. And then when they hold those mayoral elections in Tequila, there's, you know, a little bit of a shootout.
There's some violence that breaks out between the families.
And this really removes any possibility that they're going to be in cooperation again.
And so from that point forward, they are fully competitors again and are essentially warring cartels.
During this time, Jose Cuervo isn't just worried about the Souses.
He's also worried about issues in his own company.
Remember, Jose is the quiet businessman.
He likes to work behind the scenes.
But his brothers are getting aggressive.
They want to go on the offensive and use violence to gain an edge over the Sauzes.
It's just like Jose's father and his uncle all over again.
Jose, he wants to keep the peace.
In January of 1921, he travels to Mexico City to visit one of his brothers.
They go out to dinner.
And then, things take a turn.
The next day, they both fall violently ill.
They both are reported to be in their beds and they are fevered and unable to rise from their beds.
The rumor starts that they have been poisoned.
His brother Carlos was a member of the Mexican Congress.
Cuervo, of course, is having this conflict with the Souses and is a big political target himself.
self, the rumor is that someone tried to take them out.
And in many ways, I think the most likely of these targets would be Carlos, actually, because he was very outspoken.
He was one of these more combative brothers, but he was the face of that combative side of the family, taking the war to the national level.
But Carlos did not die.
He was bedridden for weeks.
It took him more than a month to recover, but he came back, Jose died in a matter of days and his death meant that, that the business now was, was functionally under the control of his more warlike brothers.
And they took this, not only as, as an attack on the family, but as an opportunity to then this was their excuse and absolute reason to go to war with, with the house of.
And so did they They did.
Within the city of Tequila itself, there were a series of gun battles that took place from essentially from that point forward through 1922, 23.
These would be on the street and overtaking the village and running the other family out and then coming back and retaking the town.
I mean, it was really a war for control of the town.
The Quervo brothers end up chasing out the Sauzas and taking control of the Tequila Valley.
Both companies would continue to do well, but Quervo remained number one.
In the many decades since, ownership of the Jose Quervo company has passed through different family members and remains in the family today.
Sausa was sold to a European conglomerate.
But if you go to the town of Tequila, you can still find remnants of the early days of the industry.
Today, on the south edge of Tequila, right by where the train station still is, there's a little cluster of small distilleries and two of my favorite tequilas made today are on a couple of those estates one fortaleza is owned by guillermo erickson sourza who is the great great grandson of sonobio sourza the founder of tequila sourza and on the other side is a a distillery called El Tequileno that is operated by Antonio Saez -Cuervo and by his son.
And they are still living right there, almost side by side.
Over the past 12 years, as Ted worked on his book, he often shared what he learned with both families, which led to a new chapter in the story.
One of the techniques that I used a lot was just saying to families that as I was going going through government archives and through other public sources and finding correspondence, finding land records, finding materials about their family, I would share some of that stuff and say, hey, if you're interested in this, I've got these letters from your great -grandfather.
And we start to compare notes.
People get excited.
Oh, the thing that you found makes something in our records make more sense.
And then you're in a conversation.
Different things have come out of the family collections that provide some details for the other families and being able to say to them, you know, oh, well, this is something that you may want to know about the Cuervos that came from the Salsa archive and vice versa.
And it started them talking with each other and they have become great friends.
Jose Cuervo. That's Ted Genovese.
His book is Tequila Wars, Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.
It's out this week.
And I should say, for this episode, we focused on Jose Cuervo, but the book spans generations.
There's a lot more than we covered here.
And it's a fascinating perspective also on Mexican history.
So if you want to learn more, definitely check out this book.
Next week on the show, we're cranking up the salad spinner.
Our rapid -fire roundtable discussion of food news and hot topics.
My guests will be comedian, actor, and author Mamrie Hart and Bloomberg reporter Dina Shankar.
That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's show about the cookie rivalry that's gone back over 100 years between Oreo and Hydrox.
Hydrox cookies are known as a cheap knockoff of Oreos, but they actually came first. We dig into why Oreo reigned supreme while Hydrox was lost to obscurity.
That episode's up now.
Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts plus over 200 ad -free music channels curated by genre and era plus live sports coverage.
Does your podcasting app have that?
And there's interviews with A -list stars and so much more.
It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one.
Right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm .com slash Sporkful.
This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O 'Hara.
Our engineer is... Jared O 'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
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