I cancelled July.

The whole thing.

I took a break from New Nouns, deleted my quarterly goals, and didn’t fill out my weekly scorecard.

Instead, I played with my kids, went to the beach, and visited my parents.

We spend so much time trying to maximize productivity for the sake of it, but so often it feels more like racing an anonymous dude in Kansas on your Peloton bike than actually going anywhere.

Know someone who might like New Nouns? Share it with them here.

⭐️ The Nouns of August 1, 2025 ⭐️

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Dead or olive

I like olives.

A lot of people don’t.

Including my wife.

Or rather, she didn’t like olives.

But now she does.

Despite Rachel Ray’s effort to get all of America chugging EVOO, olives remain on the short list of hated pizza topings, picked around bits on the charcuterie board, and all-around complaint generators.

I get it. Olives, like mushrooms, are a tough food to get on board with.

They’re salty, briney, meaty, tree fruit nut things with a big ol’ pit.

Not exactly inviting.

I mean there are few foods that feel as untrustworthy as an olive. Sometimes they are soft and mild. Sometimes they are filled with bleu cheese. Sometimes they have a rock hidden inside.

So I get it.

But I also believe that food preference is 100% nurture, and anyone can grow to like any food.

As much as we can point to universally liked foods, the strongest driver of whether we like a food or not is simply familiarity.

Just think about chili cookoffs.

A bunch of people get together and make their best chili, hoping to blow everyone away with their 6 meat deer jerky chipotle adobo white chicken chili.

Then everyone walks around and tries the different chilis, not looking for best chili, but the chili that most closely represents their personal platonic ideal of chili. AKA, the chili mom used to make.

People all around the world grow up eating differently. If you’re Korean, you probably like kimchi. If you grow up in Australia, you might like vegemite.

So if we accept that our tastes are learned, the question is simply how.

Almost two years ago, my wife decided she was open to learning to like olives.

Challenge accepted. And I had a plan.

We went to the Whole Foods olive bar and bought every single kind of olive they had and brought them home.

Then we stood around our kitchen island and tried each one at a time.

❌ The first one was bad.

❌ And the second one was worse than the first.

✅ But the third one was better than the first two.

We went through each of the 20+ olive varieties, trying each one. Not asking if it was good, but how it compared to the others.

Just like walking around a chili cook-off, we looked for flavors that felt familiar.

Instead of eating a single olive out of context and deciding if it is good in comparison to every familiar, safe food she has ever had, the comparison cut out the inherent oliveyness, and allowed her to focus only on the differences.

And it worked.

By the end of the taste test, she was actively eating, and enjoying, olives.

If there’s a food you don’t like, give it a try.

Oh, and it works wonders with picky kids.

The Four Seasons

If you already watched The Residence (above), check out The Four Seasons.

Steve Carell aged well.

be good

z

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