Cycling Stomachs and Hollywood "Spaghetti Scenes"

Plus: Sinners is massive, and Tom Cruise loves it, too

Welcome to Small Talk, an email I serve out every Monday morning exclusively to our Breakfast Club members in NYC and Charleston. The premise is simple: my top of mind topics for the week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners ahead anytime some chatter is required. From now on, I’ll be sharing it with subscribers of The Supersonic as well. Enjoy, and crib topics as necessary.

Given the news lately, dinner table conversations are sure to be same old, same old. Below, the antidote I’ll be aping from all week. As always, feel free to do the same.

For consideration …

• Go with your gut
  Let’s begin with a sport that’s been through the wringer as far as scandals go: cycling. And when we talk cycling, we’re talking one rider in particular — Slovenia’s Tadej Pogačar. On Sunday, the 26-year-old won Belgium’s 160-mile Liège-Bastogne-Liège, one of cycling’s most prestigious races, as well as the sport’s oldest one-day affair. Lance Armstrong has already declared him the GOAT. It was Pogačar's fifth major victory since winning the World Championships last September (capping a season that also saw him win the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, becoming only the third cyclist in history to bag the sport’s elusive triple crown). He also hasn’t finished worse than third in any race all season. Tl;dr: Pogačar is winning everything, on any terrain (flats, hills, cobbles, one-day races, three-week grand tours), and doing things deemed impossible in the sport’s modern era, one that previously saw riders targeting only one to two specific events throughout the season, much like marathoners. Not only that, but Pogačar doesn’t look like your typical pencil-thin cyclist, and his similarly built peers are also pulling off jaw-dropping exploits, breaking the seemingly untouchable records of cycling’s EPO-dominated doping era. The secret? Experts say it’s nutrition, and it’s a tactic that could revolutionize every endurance sport. Today’s riders are taking in up to 140 grams of carbohydrates per hour (delivered by a host of new gels, fluids, and energy bars), and if you think that sounds easy, it isn’t. Thus a significant amount of the off-season is spent training these riders’ guts to absorb such a nauseating amount of fuel, aka force-feeding themselves to develop the necessary transporters in their intestines. Look for speed records to continue to fall (we’re talking riders who can push 30 mph for six hours), and hourly carb intake to climb towards 160 grams. I’ll stick to rigatoni, thank you very much.

• Let them eat AI
  Here’s a story making the rounds: while millennials saw their frictionless urban lifestyles subsidized by startups like Uber, the Gen Z equivalent is free access to ChatGPT Plus and other AI deals. College students are reaping the benefits, and skating through finals, but to what end? Is there a benefit of acing tests that ostensibly prepare one for a job AI might soon render obsolete? In more AI doomsday news, how ‘bout those Meta chatbots intended to engage in “romantic role-play,” even with, uh, children? Concerns abound. On the flipside, Pinterest’s move to encourage teens to close the app during school hours is … encouraging. Good news for podcasters: Spotify has shelled out $100 million to podcast creators since January, all in a bid to compete with YouTube. The Google-owned video platform claims to reach “1 billion podcast consumers every month,” meaning Spotify—whose monthly podcast audience is 170 million—has a long way to go. It also has a lot more to spend. From 2021 to 2024, YouTube paid creators and media companies some $70 billion. Elsewhere in the ever evolving world of new media, New York Mag has joined Substack.

• Do you know what a spaghetti scene is?
  From the new world to the old world: Hollywood continues its decent run. Sinners, the Ryan Coogler period piece/thriller /horror flick everyone is talking about, is poised for an impressive run, seeing the smallest second-weekend box office drop since Avatar (and we all know how that movie performed). Also? Tom Cruise is a massive Sinners Stan. Cruise’s Mission Impossible swan song—whose trailer has been melting the Internet—opens Memorial Day Weekend and hopes are, of course, high. Here’s something I never knew about Mission Impossible: in the first installment of the franchise, George Lucas convinced Cruise and director Brian De Palma to feature a “spaghetti scene.” Don’t know what a spaghetti scene is in cinema speak? Learn here. Lastly, while all the above bodes well for Hollywood, the industry is seeing a California exodus. Thanks to lower labor costs and tax incentives, it’s becoming increasingly cheaper to film abroad — even if that means simply hosting a game show in a studio outside Dublin.

Quicker hits …

• Japan's love of transience.

• Marriott buys citizenM for $355m.

• Is there a serial killer in New England? Police say no, social media says yes.

• We're all crazed for protein.

Enjoy your week.

BL

Ben Leventhal
Founder + CEO
Blackbird