Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - Everyone & Spoons

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Comedian Hoja Lopez and Emma get salty with the latest spoon technology and test out new talents nobody asked for.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey dorks, quick announcement. Our podcast has requested that we sync to her cycle, so everyone and their mom is moving to once a month. She's all grown up and we are so proud. See you October 21st. Hi everyone, I'm Emma Choi and welcome to Everyone and Their Mom, a weekly show from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. This week we're talking about a high-tech utensil with their very own producer, comedian, and someone who's TikTok for you page I suspect is filled with videos of unlikely animal friendships. It's Oja Lopez. Hi Oja. Hi Emma. I, um, feel deeply what you're saying. I love that we've started the show on this sincere note.

Huge news, OHA. Huge news. New spoon just dropped. New spoon just dropped. Wow. Japanese developers have invented a new kind of spoon that makes food saltier without adding any salt. And it's amazing. Okay, this is very exciting for me

because first of all, I love soup and I love salt. Yeah. How does it work? Right. We should probably know some details. So my first guess was that the spoon simply cries into your food, but it turns out spoons aren't capable of human emotion. What actually happens is that the spoon sends an electric current into the food using ions to create a salty sensation. Translation, spoon make fate salt with jam. Hooray! Wow. Using technology that intimately in my life and in my taste buds, it should make me uncomfortable, but I want more of it. Absolutely. I mean, we should keep doing this with other utensils,

you know, like chopsticks that add umami to ramen or knives that add Old Bay to crabs or a fork that makes salad taste like milk does. I think it'll be amazing. What would you do with this weird magic spoon? Ooh. I would probably make my fingers imbibe things with sugar so that anything that I touched I could eat and it would be sweet. It's interesting to me that your fingers you think

of first as not your body but as utensils. That tells me a lot about you. Absolutely. Yeah although I do worry a lot. We're making salt out of no salt. Are we playing God? Are we creating something out of nothing like hedonists? I worry. No, and I think that this begets the question of where does it end? Yes. But yeah, I do think we're playing a little bit of God.

Is this at the same level as cloning? Yes. What's next? Freaking creating marriage out of thin air between a bird and his wife. What's next? Are you going to have headphones that are also shoes? Stop. Also, I just love the idea of spoons as new technology

because we've been waiting in line for iPhones for a decade now, but I love the idea of all these tech bros waiting outside the spoon store being like, Bro, new spoon about to drop. This is going to be insane. It's changing the game, man. Like a spoon head. It's not a sneaker head. It's a spoon head.

They get really precise and granular on what the material is. They've got supreme spoons. Chanel has a spoon. And they, they've got like Supreme spoons. Chanel has a spoon and they're doing a spoon collab with like, you know, Gucci. Oh, I would not be able to wait for this. Oh, no. Everything has its time, Emma. And I do believe that the era of the spoon is yet to come. Can you introduce yourself to us? Yeah, my name is Lelyse Stamps. I am the founder of Lolly Lolly Ceramics, and I'm based here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Yes, and thank you so much for being here. You blew up during the pandemic for your wacky ceramics that some have described as, quote, the Beyonce of mugs.

But the only way to cop one of these dope mugs is through an online drop, right? Yes, that's correct. Yeah, it's like you guys in Supreme, you know, doing the most coveted drops on Instagram. It's awesome. Yeah, we're not quite there yet, but maybe we'll get there for sure. I'm going to break in here and 3D print this image through my words into your brains. The one I'm literally looking at right now, it's like a regular like black mug, but the handle is like a swoopy swirly thing. It's kind of like, you know, children's jungle gym shrunk down, stuck to the side of a cup. And it's the coolest thing your brain can ever handle. Can you describe the energy of what it's like a couple minutes before you hit that release button? For the customer, I know from experience, people telling us that it is a bit of a rush.

And I think that during the pandemic, it was a healthy distraction. That's why it kind of got so big during that time. I think that people, that's why it kind of got so big during that time. For us on our end as a business, it is really fun because we get to follow the sales on Shopify. So we'll watch on the back end this big map of the U.S. and, you know, where the sales are happening, where people are populating all across the country. That's so funny. I'm imagining like the NASA Houston room of you guys like having popcorn and watching the map light up. Totally. Well, something that's really cool too is that you've been making mugs for Trevor Noah. How did that happen? So the Trevor Noah team, they reached

out, their production team. Trevor Noah drinks out of a mug every night on the show, which actually they never really drink on it. Like you never actually see them drinking from it. Yeah. They just have it. Yeah. They just have it with them on stage. But when the project came about, I was like, oh, that makes so much sense.

How do you make a mug that you know will look good on TV? Do you like give it a nose job and then put it on makeup? You know, that's a great question because that was one of the things I was concerned about with the lighting and everything. And what we did with this project, we put a clear glossy stamp on the outside that had the Trevor Noah Daily Show logo. And yeah, I was really concerned that you wouldn't be able to see that because it's like black on black, but it actually showed up really beautifully. And, you know, the producers, they do their due diligence and, you know, they send lighting and pictures and it helps to get a better understanding. Well, if you're up for it, we have a game we want to play with you. Is that okay? Absolutely. Oh my gosh. Awesome. Okay. So you've taken mug handles into the future.

So we're going to test the limits of physics and play a game called Handle It. We're going to give you a list of some special contestants we've created, and you tell us what kind of handle you would give their mug. Okay. Okay. An eel. Handle it. Oh, an eel? I would just make a round handle and put it around their whole body.

And they'll just, like, carry it around with them everywhere. Okay. A raccoon. Hand handle it. I don't know. I feel like they love trash. So I would try to like make it as trashy as I could in some way. Like an empty Doritos bag. Yeah, yeah. My dad, when his arms are full of groceries, handle it. Oh, I would put something where he can grab it with his mouth only or if he can grab it with his toes. There we go. How about a millipede? How would they handle it? Well, definitely be tiny. And I feel like maybe they can live in this mug. But also, I guess lots of handles on it, like lots of little mini handles. Definitely. How would a storm chaser handle it? Maybe some kind of vest mug where as they're running towards the storm, they can like,

you know, just have it on them and it doesn't fall off. I love that. How about a teeny tiny baby with the hands of a fully grown man? Handle it. Well, clearly it would have to be a small vessel with big handles. Clearly. So true. Okay.

Reverse. A fully grown man with the hands of a teeny tiny baby. Handle it. It would be like a tiny little handle and then just a big vessel they can drink from opposite. Yeah, absolutely. And sell them as a pair, you know? That's great. Well, thank you so much. Oh my gosh, it was so fun to talk and thank you for sharing all things mugs with us. Yeah, thanks for having me Emma this was great okay before we get back to me and my friend Oha in honor of this episode I taught myself how to play the old-fashioned spoons as a little instrument so uh let me play you a little bit of what I've been working on. Three, two, one.

Nice. It's bones. Ooh, this is my favorite part. Okay, this part's the chorus. You can't really tell, but this is it. You thought it was done? Nope. And.

And. And. This part goes hard. Um... Okay, okay, here we go oh here's something i want to talk about this This, I love this spoon, but it enables me to have more soup. I love soup. Soup was the best food in the world. Oh, yes.

I'll tell you right now, I've been bullied over my love of soup. Why? It's because I ate soup like two weeks in a row and somebody at my high school clocked it. And then soup girl. Wow. What a specific bully thing. La niña de la sopa. Because it was in Spanish. Oh, it sounds meaner in Spanish. Wow. What a specific bully thing. La niña de la sopa. Because it was in Spanish.

Oh, it sounds meaner in Spanish. Yeah. Ay, la niña de la sopa. Ay, bien, bien. There she is with her fish soup. I got so much flack for my love of soup. Yeah. Recently, somebody asked me what my last meal would be, and I said a soup.

Which soup? Okay, okay. There is a Japanese soup made with dashi broth and made with salmon and rice and green sencha tea as the broth. That sounds delicious, amazing, iconic. It's called an ochizuki soup, and it is just the most delightful thing in the entire world. Well, Oha, right before I kill you, I'm going to let you have a bowl of that soup. Thank you, friend. Here's the saltiest part of the podcast. The credits.

This show was brought to you by Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. This episode was produced by Hayley Fager, Zola Ray, and Kelly Wessinger. With help from Oja Lopez, Blythe Robertson, Lillian King, Sophia Hernandez, and a giant glass of Jamaica juice. And a very special shout out to Zolo Ray. Thank you for being our seducer on all of these great episodes. Our supervising producer slash best friend slash cool sister slash Brooklyn Barracuda slash mentor slash mini dishwasher fiend is Jennifer Mills.

And we love her. And our token man is Mike Danforth. Once again Lorna White thank you for having our sound be amazing sound sound queen. Lily Stamps thank you for being the queen of mugs. I think that works. Follow her on Instagram at lollylollyceramics to get one of those sweet mugs. Thank you to my co-host, comedian, producer of this show, and future space queen of the future, Oja Lopez. Stop it!

Follow her at AlohaOha. That's A-L-O-H-A-H-O-J-A. I'm Emma Choi, and you can find me at WigWigFPR, and looking at old baby pictures of this podcast, wondering why time flies by so, so fast. Oh, also, Jennifer Mills wrote us a wonderful theme song

in the baby days of this podcast, and her dream is finally coming true because we're finally going to air it. So, please listen to the theme song Everyone Hates and She Loves. Everyone. Hey. And their mom.

We're talking about the news. Everyone, everyone and their mom. Everyone, everyone. Okay, that's it. This is NPR.