Ben-Nadav Hafri
speaker
333 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Ben-Nadav Hafri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But the court was not convinced.
This is the classic version of the case. Black and white. Bimbo catches muffin thief, accuses executive of stealing all sorts of trade secrets. Except his lawyer Liz says, if you look at those documents, there's no evidence of that.
Liz says, sure, in those documents there's financial information, cost-saving strategies, etc. Confidential stuff, but that's in a different category than the ancient muffin trade secrets.
Bimbo leads with the nooks and crannies in the muffins. But in all the fine print of their complaint, nary a nook nor a cranny. And yet Liz thinks that's really what this was all about.
What anyone on the outside of the case knows is the result. Chris got crushed. If you search this case online, you'll see an example made of it on all sorts of law firm websites. You'll find it in an introductory textbook for intellectual property law. But in none of those will you hear whether Bimbo Bakeries was truly able to hold its most legendary secret up under scrutiny.
Because the case never went to trial. It was meant to go to trial, but Liz told me there wasn't money for a trial. The judge ruled in favor of Bimbo. Hostess told the New York Times, we have a business to run. We have to move on. Liz appealed the case and lost. The ruling stood. Now, I'll grant you that Chris was not an ideal defendant, but this case had real consequences for his life.
Bimbo didn't respond to a request for comment by the time we recorded this episode. I tried for months to reach Chris Botticella. Finally, I found an address, and I wrote him a letter. He wrote me an email in which he described traveling to the hearing across the country, even though he lived in California, scrambling to pay for the appeal and going bankrupt.
He writes, quote, You will never understand the impact that this had on my personal and professional life. What first grabbed me about this story was the idea that the nooks and crannies of a Thomas's English muffin had some supercharged legal power. But by this point, after reporting the story, I realized what this had meant, at least to Chris.
And when I talked to Louis and Jeannie about the future of trade secrecy, I saw a world of trade secrets opening up before me, at once futuristic and medieval, where every company had mystical codebooks full of secret recipes, a nook and cranny for every employee. Nooks and crannies is a shorthand for trade secret. But the actual trade secret of the nooks and crannies never came before a jury.
I had learned that this controversy was, to my mind, unresolved. So we at Revisionist History decided to resolve it. We are trying to free the muffin. So we're reverse engineering the muffin recipe.
Next week, we attempt to crack the code of the English muffin.
Yeah, can we make this exact English muffin? Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Matt of Haffrey, with Lucy Sullivan and Nina Byrne-Lawrence. This episode was edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Jake Flanagan, Jordan Mannequin, Greta Cohn, and Sarah Nix. Fact-checking on this episode by Kate Furby. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Echo Mountain.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Ben Matt of Haffrey.
Walk me through. Oh, no.
Walk me through what we're looking at here. I'm talking with my wife, Julia Conrad, who happens to share an apartment with me on quite a noisy street in Brooklyn.
Julia and I live opposite this grocery store that's all local, small batch, whatnot. So instead of getting just one delivery a day, they get, like, 15. Sometimes from trucks bearing, I assume, one sprig of artisanal basil. Next door, there's a noisy playground, and crucially, a fire station. A really active fire station.
What happens is the grocery store trucks block traffic, which means the fire trucks can't get out. And so, sirens. All the time. This, for me, as a writer, podcaster, and light sleeper, is a problem. So I decided to do some research. I made a spreadsheet. We counted from 9 a.m. till 10 at night, and we heard a siren 24 times. 24 times! And this is reliable data. Julia is a data scientist.
She works for the New York City government, and she has held my spreadsheet to the highest of standards.
I don't need this. I can get enough of this in my job. I don't need it from you. I will confess that the spreadsheet consisting of mauve, baby blue, puke green, a cheery yellow, and several pleasingly varied shades of red isn't even complete because it does not count the times we heard the siren in the middle of the night when there is no one on the road.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but emergency vehicles will sometimes run their lights and sirens even if there's seemingly no one around. Sirens can run anywhere from 110 decibels to over 130. That is ear-damagingly loud.
Showing 141–160 of 333 · page 8 of 17
← Previous
Next →