"Everybody says this who meets with him, but like, he's, he's an incredible host. So we, we met with him at Bedminster Golf Club in, in New Jersey...

"... which is like, you know, absolutely beautiful, you know, we had a great time.... [What did Trump serve at dinner?] Oh, he said, he said what do you guys want to eat? And I, I just, I, for some reason I was just like, I, I, I, I know exactly what to say and I'm like, meat, I want meat. And so he literally ordered every meat dish. And, and by the way, he ordered every meat dish and nothing else. [There were no sides?] There were no sides.... It was all meat and it was glorious. There was so much meat. I don't think there was room on the table for sides. [Were there drinks or no alcohol?] There? It was a diet coke. He, he, he, he mainlines diet coke. And I was mainlining it right next to him."

Said Marc Andreessen — with questions from Bari Weiss in brackets — in this "Honestly" podcast episode. This is a great podcast. (Andreessen, to quote Weiss, "got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser... He then co-founded Netscape... [and] now runs a venture capital firm... [that] invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft and Oculus to name just a few.")

There's a nice "lightning round" at the end of the podcast. After asking about the food Trump, the "incredible host," served at Bedminster, Weiss asks: "Tomorrow you wake up and you're the DNC chair, what's the first thing you would do?"

Random movie watched yesterday: The Luis Bunuel version of "Robinson Crusoe" from 1954.

I know Bunuel from "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) and "Belle de Jour" (1967) and I wondered what he did with "Robinson Crusoe." I'll just say he had a very long career with many stages and quote the NYT obituary (1983) — "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later." 

The entire "Robinson Crusoe" film is on YouTube. I ran into it on the Criterion Channel, but here's the whole thing, and I'll just clip out the one 4-minute section that I think is most distinctive, which happens when he's been alone for a very long time and before he has any thought that he'll ever see anyone again. His dog Rex has just died. "Now, truly alone, starved for the sound of a voice, any voice":

 

Here's the full text of the book. Have you read it? Recently? I don't think I have, though I do remember reading 2 of Daniel Defoe's  novels: "A Journal of the Plague Year" and "Moll Flanders." From his Wikipedia page: 

Defoe was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works—books, pamphlets, and journals — on diverse topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He was also a pioneer of business journalism and economic journalism.... In Defoe's early childhood, he experienced some of the most unusual occurrences in English history: in 1665, 70,000 were killed by the Great Plague of London, and the next year, the Great Fire of London left only Defoe's and two other houses standing in his neighbourhood.... Defoe died on 24 April 1731, probably while in hiding from his creditors. He was often in debtors' prison. The cause of his death was labelled as lethargy....