Grubstakers - Episode 143: Daniel Lubetzky (Kind bar CEO)

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

This week we profile Mexican Jew Daniel Lubetzky who’s fathers experience in the holocaust informed his views on making money the “Kind” way. The kindest way to make the world a better place by profiting from the slave labor of chocolate, the palm oil farmers burning their trees to maintain their deadlines and the horrendous amount of water utilized to produce this many nuts. Daniel Lubetzky was able to build trail mix in a bar with his gumption, his intelligence and the measly 200,000 loaned to him from his Friends and Family LLC. Kind bars taste delicious and the FDA flip flopped on them being called healthy, because the check finally cleared all that and more right here on Grubstakers.

We'll be right back. I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, two, the evil has gone. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and today I am proud to be joined by all of my co-hosts. With me is... Steve Jeffries.

Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwal. And we want to start by just giving our sincere and heartfelt congratulations to our good friend Yogi Poliwal, who just got back from India and got married again. Yes, I got back... New wife this time time that's right uh this one was arranged first ones for love neither of them were happy about it so our recording schedule is going to be difficult because yogi will be commuting between his two families from here on out yes the only one that knows about my true identity is my podcast listener fans But we did get a sitcom deal out of it. How will he maintain his podcast schedule and his two wives?

Coming soon to NBC. Produced by Judd Apatow. But congratulations, Yogi. Yogi has the henna tattoos on him, all ceremonial and such. That's right. I've got a henna on my hands and feet. It is a thing that I put on because I'm now a married man. Oh.

My family got to meet my beautiful wife, and it was pretty awesome. I'm very happy about it. Yeah, there's a bitchin' picture of you two getting married. That's right. You're in a big turban with a feather. I am. I am. And it's made an emoji out of it. That's great.

You know, it was pretty fun. It was pretty wild. Way more colorful than the Woff weddings I'm used to. It was great to have my wife and her family meet my entire family and a whole bunch of people from around the U.S. and one of my friends from Seattle joined us. And it was a truly fantastic gathering. Yeah, and we look forward to when you have a wedding that we can all make it to.

Yeah, none of you fuckers showed up, and honestly... You got married twice, and we didn't go. What are you going to do? Well, we got a third wedding happening in Antarctica in two months, so I'm going to need to take off three months then. I will say that colorful photo of Yogi's wedding. It's nice to see a white lady in such an Indian photo who's not plotting to destroy it. Yeah, her family was fantastic, but they were very worried about acting as if they were culturally appropriating.

I'm like, you're marrying me. It's fine. Wait, there's a video actually right before you left, and I was wondering if you met the Rajasthan robot monkey that made all those other monkeys really sad? No, I did not meet the Rajasthan robot monkey. He was invited to the wedding, but he declined just like you because you both have a heart of stone.

I do like that white people went from starving your country to being really overly apologetic. Very sensitive about offending anybody. And it only took like a hundred years. Was this one of the week-long weddings where people can just kind of filter through? It lasted about four-ish days. It could have been longer.

The main thing I took from this wedding was that the reason Indian weddings last so long, because if they're any shorter, there'd be more Indian divorces. Because after this process, I don't want to deal with that ever fucking again. Fucking after five days of dealing with dancing and henna and just all the fucking bullshit, I will never deal with this ever again. You should see the divorce party it's twice it's twice as long 15 days and you have to apologize to everyone that thanked you uh but we're very thrilled to have all the boys back together the boys are back in town all four of the hosts are together and we've got a great subject today

because we're talking today about daniel labets. Before we get into that, I wanted to actually address something that's a bit topical. I just want to say, Mamma mia, my coronavirus crashed at the stock market! Is an offensive joke. And I would like to unequivocally condemn anybody who makes it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just imagining like one of our Italian listeners has contracted coronavirus.

And that's the last thing he hears. They're in isolation. And just to take their mind off their own mortality in the sense that they have wasted their life. And the Grim Reaper is walking right up to them and there's nothing they can do. They put on their favorite podcast as a form of escapism. Second favorite. Yeah, favorite. Come on, Sean.

Let's be honest. After listening to the new Chapo and they need some more stuff. Right. S&P is down, what, 3%? Yes. That's great. 1,000 points or something on the Dow Jones? Yeah, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down like three percent on the day

and i was just thinking it'd be great if it was like the deus ex characters created the fucking fake coronavirus to kill bernie sanders but then they accidentally crashed the global economy right before his election and he wins in a landslide you know one thing i know is about coronavirus is that we don't hear about that protest anymore what happened to that ever since the fucking virus came out no more hong kong protests going on uh well they want to catch it so that makes sense that makes sense they actually didn't get it in hong kong because their tear gas masks kept it out that's true they're already prepared actually yeah right right uh but yes we will be watching the coronavirus and our sympathies to any listeners who have contracted it we are we are pulling for you including ourselves in two months yes we live in a major metropolitan area

we're all gonna get it i was just thinking at work like i haven't really accomplished anything i want to accomplish with my life and you just start thinking about that when like pandemic is in the news again i i was just thinking at not work, man, it's nice that I don't have to take the train right now. Are you going to go ahead and try and get it, Sean? Yeah. You try and contract it on purpose. But the great thing is like, I mean, besides stand up achievements, the only thing that I like really want to do is I want to get high and watch all of the Oliver Stone, Vladimir Putin interviews. Because that's like the closest you can get

to smoking a blunt with Vladimir Putin. Haven't we already done that at least once? No, I haven't watched the whole thing through. You've seen parts of it. Yeah. Now my wife would get mad at me if I was high for more than like six hours. You know, Sarah had a cold when we were on our way to India

and in London to Delhi. She coughed during that flight the entire time and the flight attendants came over multiple times to be like, hey are you alright? Are you okay? And I was very happy she was sick and not me because I know that They used a gun?

No, they didn't use the gun but they were like if you're sick, we should tell the authorities like they were very intent on making my wife tell someone that she's sick the temperature check gun just for a clear oh i i didn't know what kind of sarah was like yeah yeah i'm fine i just i just got off this cruise ship and uh you know i've been feeling weird since then is that a cruise after inspecting the iPhone factory? Was I in Wuhan?

No, that was months ago. I remember when the Ebola virus made its big New York debut. And I started to feel like I had a cold. So I went to a pharmacy and bought just a thermometer. And both me and the cashier were freaked out uh but yes um we're talking today about daniel lebetsky uh daniel lebetsky is the founder of kind bars or i believe that the company is called the Kind Healthy Snacks Company. And you might be familiar with these things, you know, particularly if you live in the United States, they have this colorful packaging with, you know, the orange, the red, the green, the blue stripes on it.

And I think they, in addition to the packaging, really more than that, the company kind of advertises themselves as A, healthy and all natural, but also as kind. That's where the entire name comes from. They promote doing kindness and doing good. That's their entire branding is wrapped up into that. And of course, Daniel Labetsky has made himself a billionaire off this. So I kind of wanted to start the episode by just playing maybe 30 seconds of an official Kind Healthy Snacks commercial,

and then we can kind of respond to the claims within. But this commercial has been viewed more than 14 million, almost 15 million times on YouTube. So I think this is kind of a fairly representative portrayal of how they market themselves and how they are perceived by the world at large. Kindness is magical. So in that sense, I guess Daniel really is a magician. We don't just aim to have great products that sell well and be beloved. We aim to change the way people see business as a force for social good. That's what we're here to do today.

They say you are what you eat, and it matters what you're made of. That's why every kind product is a reminder to be kind to ourselves our bodies they're doing yoga right now in the world team building exercise they're doing that's right oh nice scanning at the end i do want to say i i i should mention uh there's a part in there where he's going through a door into an office. And I'm about ninety nine percent sure that I've gone through that exact same door into that exact same office. Because when I first moved to New York in like 2013 or 2014, I actually applied for a job at Kind Bar through some like staffing agency right and I remember being so confused when looking them up because this is before

Kind Bars were ubiquitous right and so I'm you know doing my pre-interview research. And I'm like, is this a charity company? Because everything on their website was just about everything that they give to the community. Right, right. Yeah, it... Did not get the job. Their entire MO is that their company's social message is just as important as their profit margins.

Right. And, you know, you heard in that commercial, whatever bullshit they said about kindness is magic and Danielle is a magician and all this shit. So I just have here, and I know it's not the greatest visual or it's not the greatest, it's not the greatest for an audio podcast. It's not a visual at all, Sean. Yes. But I have a Kind Bar here with us, and my co-host can see it.

This is the Salted Caramel Dark Chocolate Nut Kind Bar. And just to enhance the episode, Sean will be crinkling that wrapper into the microphone for the next hour and 40 minutes. This is the theater of the mind, is you can hear the wrapper crinkling, so you know this thing is here. This is our ASMR episode. Now Sean's about to take a big bite out of it into the microphone and chew. Only for the patrons. If you want the bonus content, that comes later. But anyways, what I wanted to say here is if you look on the back of this particular kind bar, you will see the ingredients.

And I've looked all over this thing. You'll see the ingredients. The ingredients include unsweetened chocolate. They include alkalized cocoa. They include cocoa butter. But the one thing you won't find on this kind bar, you can look all over the label, the wrapper of any kind bar anywhere, you won't see any certificate from Fairtrade USA. You won't see any certificate from the Fairtrade Standards. You won't see any certificate from IMO Fairtrade for Life, their certificate. You won't see any certificate from the Fair Trade Standards. You won't see any certificate from IMO, Fair Trade for Life, their certificate. You don't see anything from the Rainforest Alliance. You don't see a certificate from UTZ, U-T-Z. And what these certificate companies attempt to do, you might have seen them on various products, is they attempt to trace the

supply chains of the inputs that go into various products to ensure there is not slavery, trafficking, or child labor. So what you get with Kindbar is a company that is marketing themselves as the kindest, most gentle company on earth that is in all likelihood 100% using child slavery to make their products. But they're kind, Sean. And this is Make Her Upstakers. I'm Andy Palmer.

They're kind to your body kind of your mind the kind movement being that your poops are better because you ate a whole bunch of nuts how healthy is this really not really i mean uh there was a thing we'll get into where they had a tiff with the fda it's like obviously it's it's healthier than eating you know snickers bars but there's a lot of sugar in these things. Yeah, I'd probably say on, probably on par with honey-rusted peanuts. Yeah, they taste good. That's the whole thing we're trying. I mean, I've had a few bars before. In 2015, the FDA was like, you can't put healthy on this. This ain't healthy.

And then 2016, they're like, ah, I mean, it's better than candy, so it's technically okay. Yeah, I had one yesterday and then my stomach felt like shit and between that and my job interview was my research contribution this episode in 2016 they were like all right the check cleared so i guess that's good but i want to i want to go over uh the very quickly the slavery thing because people should understand how chocolate supply chains work in the world we talked about this on the giovanni ferraro episode the italian chocolate billionaire it's on the patreon side if you would be so inclined but to briefly rehash how the only

respite from my coronavirus is all the slaves i control mama mia uh so i'm just gonna quoting from fortune magazine uh the u.s department of labor in 2015 conducted a survey uh this is for the 2013 to 2014 growing season uh in uh the ivory coast in ghana uh they found more than 2.1 million children engaged in what they call quote-unquote objectionable labor practices this is uh generally also called slavery um people should know that more than two-third well maybe and maybe it's not slavery maybe they're repaying their debt to society people should know that more than two-thirds of the world's cocoa supply comes from west africa primarily ghana and the ivory coast so that's you know 68 78 of the world's cocoa supply comes from west africa primarily ghana and the ivory coast so that's you know 68 78 of the world's cocoa supply comes from this area which the u.s department

of labor says that there are over 2.1 million child slaves working there uh many of these children are trafficked uh exposed to dangerous chemicals they're illiterate they're harmed if they leave uh just according to given housing food uh just according to law street taught valuable trade skills they get this podcast for free they might get their passports back if they do a good enough job they can move up the corporate ladder to uh getting their passports back. They get to meet wealthy scions of American business and politics. So just quoting from lawstreetmedia.com, children in Ghana and Ivory Coast,

again, this is where 70, about 70% of the world's cocoa supply comes from. Children are often sold into slavery by their parents or kidnapped. The average work week can last from 80 to 100 hours while working on the farms. These children receive no salary or education. The living conditions are brutal

as children are often beaten and rarely well fed. So you talk about this kind company. This is how this guy became a fucking billionaire. Let's just get that straight right off the bat. The kind bars rest on a base of human trafficking and slavery. But they taste so good, Steven. I mean, you can't have good tasting bars without slavery. I don't know.

You heard Andy. You gave him a stomachache. And that was before he knew about the slavery part. Yeah. Yeah, you completely fucked up my Counter-strike global offensive game and just one other thing from this fortune article again this u.s department of labor survey comes from 2015 quoting from fortune magazine the total number of children found to be subject to child labor was a 21 increase over the previous survey five years earlier so again we talked about it more on the giovanni ferraro episode but the industry the chocolate industry has promised

since you know late 90s early 2000s we're gonna end this child slavery thing uh just give us till 2020 and then just recently this year an article came out like we're not gonna meet that goal i did used to eat con bars on the semi-regular and then after the uh giovanni ferrari episode like occasionally i would have chocolate but after that my chocolate consumption has actually just dropped because it's just i mean it's kind of the same reason i went vegetarian where it's just like i can't touch it without thinking about how gross uh a lot of the stuff is uh but then, like, in my mind, I was like, well, there's not a lot of chocolate

in Kind bars. Yeah, I had the opposite effect. I just, the guilt made me want it so much more. So my chocolate consumption has just gone through the roof. Just jerk off while eating it? Jerk off with Nutella. I mean, honestly.

Our podcast has increased Kind bar consumption among sadists by 200 percent yeah cry child cry this chocolate tastes so good real crime is no one enjoying it but you know and then so there's that and there's also you know palm oil we'll talk about a bit more later uh kind bar one of the main ingredients is palm oil. Certainly not the only product to use it.

But I guess we could just kind of start the chronological biography of our subject today, Daniel Libetsky. Because in addition to, you know, talking about his charity bullshit, which we'll also talk about, the Kind Bar gives very little to charity compared to other companies, yet somehow they've marketed themselves as front and center on charity to the point where even forbes magazine wrote a profile which was surprisingly bare knuckle oh yeah calling them out on this um but you know we'll talk about that but he also uses his own life story daniel uses the life story of um his father who is a holocaust survivor and has a very interesting life story, but he essentially has... And Sean has some jokes for that.

He has marketed that and used it to create his multi-billion dollar company. Yeah, for this episode, I read Daniel Lubetzky's book, Do the Kind Thing. You read his book, but you forgot the name of the book? Yeah, I did, yeah. Fair enough. I got it from King County Library System. Oh, nice. It's almost like there's not much insight contained in these CEO books to the point

where you're like, what the fuck is the title? What was on that 300 pages I read? A bunch of cliches and hard work build success bullshit. I mean, the book- Something about taking risks. It wasn't good. I mean, I read, I think, about 35% of it within two days. And honestly, Very Bad is a good review of it.

Did he have a paper route in the occupied territories? No, no. He didn't do any of that. But the entire thing is like... There's three themes to Daniel Lubezki's entire life. And it's one, his dad was in the Holocaust. He's a crazy Mexican Jew that nobody wants to work with until he tells him his great ideas. And three, he has these like nine pillars of how his company works and why he's successful.

And you keep referencing these nine pillars every time. But honestly, after a certain point, it's like purpose, grit, honesty. Like the book is like a... Surviving the selection process. It's a grandizing, you know, business memoir slash tell-all about why he's great. It's so weird how every one of these billionaires, like, after, you know, they do some scammy thing to become a billionaire, they'll create kind of an elaborate backstory for what it took them to get where they are today. Right, right.

And like they, you know, in the book several times he reveals why he is who he is, including a friends and family LLC contribution that we'll mention in a moment. But let's get back to the beginning. Danny Lubitsky, born 1968 in Mexico City to Roman Lubitsky and Sonia Lubitsky. Mexico City at the time had 75% of the Jewish population of Mexico, which was about 50,000

people. Let me ask you guys this question. So I don't know about his mom's race, but I'm pretty sure she might just be Jewish that immigrated to Mexico, even though she's described as a Mexican Jew. And his dad is from I believe Lithuania. Yeah, yeah. And so is Daniel from Lithuania and maybe not a Mexican mother a Mexican person?

Seems like it if he grew up there. He spent his first 16 years there and then he moved to San Antonio. That counts. But what's frustrating is that like, if two African parents had a kid in France, that kid's more African

than he is French. Does that make any sense? It's frustrating when fucking white people get to claim an ethnic background and then go back to being Jewish

when they want to be Jewish and then go back to being Mexican when they want to be Mexican. You're the only one that can answer these questions. All I'm going to say is before we recorded this, you were like,

why is there someone on the discord who changed his name to Yogi's phrenology tools? It is true. Like the only way to have this conversation is for us to paper bag test this guy, which Yogi is the only person on this podcast who could get away with doing that. Wait a second.

Am I fucking this wrong to be questioning this thing? Am I not right to be like, it seems to me that you can culturally own a group if you're a white person growing up in the country culture, but if you're a black or Brown from that culture, you don't get to claim it because you're just black or Brown. No, no,

that's no, no, that's true. Yeah. Either way it should work. It's, it's, and it's something that like,

it's not that big a deal, but he constantly mentioned in the book how he's a Mexican Jew and nobody wants to work with him because of his cultural heritage. And I'm not denying that since he grew up in that culture that he has that in him, but it's frustrating as fuck when it's part of why his ethnic background is so mystifying and he can do magic and shit, if you know what I mean. He does still have the accent, which, I mean, I guess if you moved when you were 16 you would still have the accent i don't know so i guess like if you have the accent you can say you're mexican i would just say you know

it speaks to kind of the wider problem of um let's say anti-materialist uh identity politics where essentially because he grew up fucking rich in mexico city so he can say i'm a marginalized person even though uh we fucking executed our maid like in season two of narcos when we were children uh so yeah he grew up as like one of the fucking one percent in mexico and then you know he comes and he says you know my background is as a marginalized uh victimized person you know forget the hundred thousand dollar loans I got to start my business. So it's insidious that way, certainly. So his dad, Roman, was in the Daschow camp.

Daschow, am I saying that right? Dachau. Dachau. Dachau camp during the Holocaust. He cites a story. That's the one word I can pronounce. He cites a story where- When it comes to that one,

Sean can hit it right in the perfect part of the back of the throat. Give me all the extermination camps, I'm good, but the names of the people who died in them, much more difficult.

Sounds like Dachau, Treblinka, Sobibor. I looked at Andy because he's our resident German expert, but Sean cut in real quick. Dino cites a story where a German soldier threw a rotten potato at his dad as sustenance,

which as an act of kindness that is mentioned in the book. So he grew up in Mexico City and at 12 years old is when he realized how Jew-centric his upbringing was. He was playing with a friend and his direct quote,

I said something like, if you don't stop doing that, I'm going to kick you your tuchus. And he said, what is tuchus? And I'm like, what are you talking about? Lubitsky recalled, I thought tuchus was a word in Spanish. So, you know,

it wasn't like he was growing in Mexico City around only Mexican people. Right. He was isolated. He grew up relatively rich. Lubitsky's father was a partner in International Bonded Warehouses and in United export trading association

both duty-free shop chains which had with headquartered in laredo texas which is why they would move to san antonio later on in life right i don't know what duty-free means beyond expensive i think it's tax-free oh it's like it's well it is more expensive so it often doesn't matter that it's tax-free for you. Yeah, like my only reference to duty-free is it's one of the really expensive stores in an airport. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense to me. Like how it's like tax-free, but it's like, why do people go there if it's more expensive? So I was talking about this with a friend that traveled with me to India.

And essentially, if let's say you were on a business trip and you made a fuckload of money and you can't like declare that you made more money than you would be importing in, you just buy a whole bunch of shit. Swallow it in a condom. Yes, you swallow it in a condom and then you poop it out later.

No, but you could buy a whole bunch of shit at the airport and then have less cash on you. so it's not technically money laundering but it is a way of allowing yourself to travel with more money than you legally technically could yeah i can't uh no i don't have thirty thousand dollars i do have this collection of vintage guitars um i listened to this um entrepreneurs podcast that daniel lebetsky did uh it was you know of course ass kissy and he uh tells his usual story but you know the basic story that he tells from there is

like we're saying his dad was a child from lithuania set to dachau concentration camp um his dad i think was in there when he was nine years old he got out he was liberated by the americans when he was 12 years old um and he also tells, you know, he tells that story that Yogi just told about the guard throwing him the potato. And he, of course, ties this into his business. Like this is an act of kindness. And this is what inspired me to name the company after this. But he also tells kind of a, I guess, disturbing story about his Lithuanian landlord. Wait, the name is supposed to be tied to the Holocaust? Yeah. I mean, he tells these stories a lot about like how various acts of kindness helped his father survive the holocaust like he talks about the

german guard throwing him the potato as an act of kindness even in the face of this horror and he also tells this uh disturbing story i'm going to kind of paraphrase which is uh the uh he't let me run the gas chambers. He's in, okay, so he's in Lithuania. Maybe cut that one. No, do not. He's in Lithuania. Daniel Labetsky is in Lithuania, or sorry, his dad is in Lithuania as a child.

His grandfather is, he's living in this room with a Lithuanian landlord. And what happened when, you know, the Nazis came into the East is they would whip up these local pogroms. So they would get, you know, local anti-Semitic elements to go out and just kill Jews, basically. So Daniel on this podcast tells a story

about his father as a child was like looking for food. So his Lithuanian landlord took him out to a pile of dead Jewish bodies in the middle of the street and said, oh, hey, you could grab a bite to eat from one of them or something like that. It was a very disturbing story. But then he also says that apparently his landlord like saved the family when it came time for a later Jewish roundup. So he tells this as like also a kindness story where even like bad people can engage in acts of kindness. And it's like, you know, it's a very horrifying story about human nature. But I guess it also kind of disturbed me that he all tied this back into branding for his fucking candy bar company. Yeah, I mean mean that is one of

the things that's definitely apparent in the in the book as well where you know the entire notion of his father being in the holocaust as harrowing and as dark as that whole thing is it flips it back into and that's why my company is such a good business it's like what like you know that is like billionaire mindset yeah it's like always be selling Like, you know. That is like billionaire mindset. It's like, always be selling, even when you're talking about the Holocaust. Right. That's when me and my friends started the Kindsats group. Cut that.

No. Don't cut any of the Holocaust jokes. All right. So, at 16 years old, his family moved to San Antonio. Top it with a K. One of the sources said it was due to anti-Semitic attacks that occurred in Mexico City. In the 80s, he moved to the U.S.? In 1984, he would move to the united states uh before this though

he would sell watches at flea markets uh and eventually where did he get those from oh wow sean it was actually someone that was introduced to him by his dad who was letting him buy the watches wholesale and you know sean you're not wrong there is a chance yeah me and that guard who gave me the potato struck up an import export business deal it was very lucrative actually can i tell a uh surprisingly relevant flea market joe sure so when i did uh study abroad in germany um i wanted to get a bike and everyone was like go to the flea market so i went to the flea market and there were stands where people were selling bikes and watches. There were also stands where people were selling all of grandpa's Nazi memorabilia.

Yeah. Did you get any? I did not. Actually, in New York, you can find... There's something similar where there's a flea market. I think it's the Chelsea Flea Market. And I remember a couple of years ago, I went there and there was a guy with a stand where it's mostly more along the lines of grandpa's communist memorabilia.

But there's some Nazi memorabilia that clearly grandpa picked off of some fallen individuals. Oh, really? They fell down and then they dropped things and the other guy picked it up? Something along those lines, yeah. It was my assumption of where that came from. You see Obama there just checking things out. They were souvenirs from the front. I'll take the Woffin SS uniform.

He went to Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. If you like your Luger, you can keep it. He got his B.A. in economics and global connections. He would go study overseas in both France and Israel and received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1993. And this is directly from the Israel Times. After law school at Stanford, Lubetzky received a $10,000 fellowship given out by the Bay Area's Jewish Federation to pursue economic research in Israel and attempt to foster joint Arab-Israeli adventures. One day in a grocery store, he came across a jar of sun-dried tomato spread that he devoured in one sitting.

When he went back to buy more, he was told that there was none left because the company was going out of business. Recognizing an opportunity, Lubetzky tracked down the spread manufacturer's Yoel Benesh, who was using expensive jars and other imported materials from Europe. Lubetzky convinced him to work with local Palestinian farmers and an Arab glass manufacturer in Egypt. And this is the beginning of his entire, I can do good for the region and make money in the process. And so in 94, he creates Peaceworks, which sells tapenades and sauces today.

Its trademark being, cooperation never tasted so good. Which is hilarious to me. Right. And a lot of this biography comes from this Forbes piece we teased earlier. And I just want to tell the listeners the title. It's Social Spin Doctor. Kind Bars' Daniel Labetsky builds a, at that time, $1.5 billion fortune on do-gooder rhetoric. Which, again, is uh aggressive for a forbes profile is by angel uh who young uh probably got that wrong but uh she's the author of the piece

um and it talks about while you're reading it imagine that it's the name of the death camp um but she talks about you know how kind bar hasn't really given that much to um charity uh and just uh picking up on that thing Yogi mentioned there, I just wanted to quote from this. After he starts his company, PeaceWorks, quote, he realized this would also test his theory about achieving peace through business, sourcing glass jars from Egyptians,

sun-dried tomatoes from Turks, and olive oil from Palestinian farmers. This is an area where Arabs and Israelis could cooperate, Lubetzky recalls thinking. And I just want to point out that maybe military conditions in Israel might have gotten him a better price on those inputs than he otherwise would have gotten. And he's, of course, able to spin this as a social cooperation between former enemies or current enemies, I should say. Yeah, I was shelling children for the IDF. I thought it would be a nice gesture to tie a potato to a mortar.

And I guess we can pick up on this again later, but Lubetzky's politics with regard to Israel are kind of like two-state solution dove, where I actually did find some right-imon Peres, which, uh, minor note, Shimon Peres, uh, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who said he visited Epstein more than 10, but less than a hundred times has also said that Shimon Peres introduced him to Jeffrey Epstein in 2002. So, uh, put a pin in that one. But, uh, the point is to know your employees. The point is that, um, Daniel Lubezki isetsky is a kind of a let's say liberal two-state solution israel guy but he's still an israel guy who writes blog posts about how jeremy corbyn brings anti-semitism to the british labor party yeah he's a liberal in the sense that as long as it helps his business he was willing to do the right thing or the kind thing if you will

it is a zionist liberal it is so beautiful how yesterday after bernie sanders announced that he would not be going to the apac conference reading apac statement and watching them have to fight so hard the urge to call bernie sanders anti-semitic like you know they really really to do it. Some of them still do it, actually. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, right-wing Zionists will still call Bernie Sanders either anti-Semitic or, like, a self-hating Jew. Hilarious. But in their official statement, like, they just could not manage it.

So, at this point at PeaceWorks, he's selling these sundried tomato spreads as well as imported bath salts and soaps. He, from Peace Works, buys just a whole bunch of stock of soaps and body salts. How did they source those? Oh, Sean. How many Holocaust jokes are we going to do on this episode? You can cut it. No, we'll keep them all in um but in the book he describes basically being in new york and learning how to sell he buys what he thinks is a small amount of stock but turns out it's so large that he has

to fill his entire apartment and rent a part of the basement to house all of this stuff and he thinks that he could sell it in like a Mother's Day sale at like a Port Authority. But nobody traveling through Port Authority wants to buy fucking soaps and shit, you know, fucking fancy sun-dried tomato paste. But at this time, he talks with Zabars. He travels all of New York and Philadelphia to sell all of his stuff. And then by age 25, he is running low on cash, and this is where he

gets a $100,000 loan from his father, as well as $100,000 invested from friends. Friends and family, LLC, strikes again. So if you read his book, you'll find out how you can do that too. Get a $100,000 loan from your dad. Oh, you mean take risks?

So you made it sound like... he was just walking around Port Authority asking people if they would want to buy things. But the reality is he was probably making marketing pitches to the shops that are operating out of Port Authority. He was actually doing both. So he had set up a kiosk at Port Authority and then would like he would drive at night and what he calls his old cougar which not a thing you call a car by the way but he would drive and figure out what all the stores and bodegas and grocery stores were in Manhattan and then in the morning walk to

all of them and then sell it door to door all the tomato spray it's like yeah I got a big discount on my kiosk at Port Authority I just have to go into the bathroom at 3 a.m. and suck this guy off. It's in my book, by the way. And so we'll move forward. By the way, Port Authority,

great blowjobs. If you're ever in NYC, best blowjobs in the city. I know we told you guys we wouldn't sell out and do ads on this podcast, but we use Port Authority blowjobs in the city. I know we told you guys we wouldn't sell via PeaceWorks and OneVoice, the charity with PeaceWorks. All of his companies have charities within them that, I don't know, basically are their marketing strategy. Instead of spending money on advertisements, he has charitable arms that choose to fun things to advertise the product itself. But from the book itself, this is him talking about in 2002, he was training for the New York Marathon.

I happened to be in Colombo, Sri Lanka, exploring a new business venture. I was training for the New York City Marathon, and I started my 18-mile run in the capital. By the time I completed the distance, gasping, sweating, endorphins pumping, I found myself on the remote outskirts of the city along a quiet lake surrounded by Sinhalese kids and friendly fishermen curious about my appearance. I was famished. I had a bit of money with me to get back to town. What I did not have were healthful,

portable snacks to refuel. It was a long trip back to the hotel. This entire story is just him saying, I was hungry at the end of a run. And this is the genius idea that began the kind future. And he doesn't even think of the idea. He goes to Australia for one of the business trips for Peace Works. And there he finds a fruit and yogurt bar.

And he's like, this stuff's pretty good. And I believe it's the Go Natural bar from Australia. And he sells that to American manufacturers like whole foods and a few other like health brands but then go naturals gets bought by a corporation and changes their natural ingredients to a more chemical based uh you know they fucking cheapen the the bar and so all of the health food brands are like no we don't want this anymore and that is when he goes okay i should make bars that wouldn't be uh watered down by any corporation that i could control the ingredients and that becomes the beginning of the kind uh

the kind legacy i mean that's that's as inside or that that's like as deep of an insight as saying i was playing stardew valley and i found that if you got an acorn a pine cone and a maple seed you could make your own bar and then your energy doesn't drop anymore and I thought what if I made a billion dollars selling these it's another demonstration of the inherent

randomness of who gets to be a billionaire in addition to just the destructiveness well also just having you know access to a hundred in startup capital. Oh, yeah. Or 200,000. The fact that he was the person who had access to that. Yeah.

And also just the capital to engage in international travel. Because like we were just saying, the way that Forbes profile describes this is, in the late 90s, he landed inia and found a bar with whole nuts and fruit that he liked a few years later he tried to replicate it in the u.s which is a very polite way of saying he stole the idea and he happened to have money that allowed him to steal a good idea he did the tech billionaire thing you know someone else made it and then he found a way to make a billion dollars off it in america he talks about after that one story that in thinking of the creation of the product he could bring a fruit or some nuts with him but the fruit could

spoil easily and it was too easy for me to eat the bag of nuts in one sitting so impulse control and eating nuts is what would cause kind to get and here's the thing kind bars are good i won't deny that but it's just trail mix in a bar that's all we're fucking talking about here it's not like it's some sort of genius innovation to put it in a square no it's just trail mix in a bar that's all we're fucking talking about here it's not like it's some sort of genius innovation to put in a square no it's just nuts and fruits and it's just trail mix uh if you squeeze trail mix really really tight i mean nature valley yeah it's pretty much the same thing well so yeah nature valley and i think there's another one by kellogg's the it's got the fruit filling those two bars sell more than kind bars as it is, those two bars sell more than Kind Bars as it is. And those two bars... All this is like what you buy at REI right before you hit the trail.

Exactly. And that's the other thing. He's designed a product that specifically is for the anaffluent population that can afford to eat healthily. When it comes to the FDA saying that this bar was unhealthy in 2015 and changed it in 2016, it's not healthy. It's just less unhealthy compared to candy. And in that reality, since the prices are comparable,

the FDA is like, ah, sure. But so he starts this company in 2004, and then it kind of goes on and then he gets equity investors in 2008 i guess like right around the time the financial crisis hits yeah and at that time as well he meets his wife and i want to mention the story real quick because uh they met uh you're like and his wedding sucked it wasn't even as good as my second best wedding. Only one day long? That's idiots.

Chumps. No, but they met at a karaoke bar in Chinatown. Did he put tattoos all over his arms and legs? I don't think so. And he talks about, her name is Dr. Michelle Liebman. She mentioned that anytime someone finds out you're a doctor they ask you questions

and he mentioned he had a bad back so I gave him the excellent advice to take ibuprofen but not the recommended doses three or four pills to reduce the inflammation

he let me know it worked amazingly this is the amazing advice that billionaire's wife decided to give him by the way take more ibuprofen uh the rest of the story is he tried pursuing her but she was busy and then months later

he was dating a couple of people and then once that stopped he called her again and she's like yeah let's go let's hang out that's how they got married ibuprofen recommendation ladies and gentlemen what what a pillar is that in his book uh it's not in his book actually that entire thing well actually i probably just didn't get to it i read the first 40 i gotta fucking back to the fucking taking a nap yeah i mean like from my understanding of the story is he get uh just from the forbes profile is uh he gets these uh private equity investors as well as the founders of vitamin water. They buy a stake for like $15 million in December 2008. He's later, he buys the stake back from them.

Who would have thought? Someone with the exact same business model. We sell Gatorade, but we say it's healthy. Yeah, it's watered down Gatorade. So it's not technically as bad as Gatorade. Yeah. But yeah, he later buys the stake back from them in 2014. And then just from the Forbes profile, it kind of says that his investors are really the ones who convinced him to start giving out free samples of these things.

Like he resisted it at first, i guess just quoting from the uh profile from 2009 onward kind took off uh lebetsky credits the expansion of the company's free sampling program as the reason for growth at the time in 2008 kind spent just 800 giving away samples of its bars in 2009 with urging from his new investors kind expanded his sampling and field marketing budget to 800800,000. Today, the company has a $20 million sampling budget, which pays the field workers and covers the cost of the free bars. So essentially, the company is kind of like between 2004, 2008, you know, doing very middling

because he's not giving away free samples. And his investors are like, hey, give these things away for free. Right. And in fact, like tied up with the whole kindness bullshit they have some sort of i forget the name of it but kind acts program he he brags about this where if they observe people doing kind acts they will like give them a little plastic medallion which great for the environment uh but they'll also send them some kind bars and And this is, it's part of their marketing. This is a marketing, you know, operation that justifies itself as like, yeah, we're doing shit for charity and giving our product to nice people. Yeah, this is exactly the same as just when I remember in college Axe Body Spray was giving away Frisbees.

But they've just tied it into a social betterment bullshit framework. And a Frisbee is is fun whereas these things are just little things yeah i doubt these things can these can catch air um but yeah and then from there we mentioned in 2015 the fda says you got to remove the word quote-unquote healthy from it but then they they actually do appeal that. And then in 2016, in May 2016, the- You're actually, sorry, you're going to have to put poison on this.

Yeah, we need to put a skull and some crosses on this thing, if that's all right. In 2016, the FDA reverses itself. And now they're allowed to call their product healthy again. And then in 2017, Mars Corps bought 40% of it for an undisclosed amount, which I love that. I love that they can reveal how much of it they own, but not how much they paid for it. Yeah, Mars Corporation, that famously kind corporation that owns 40% of kind bars. Also famous for human slavery in their chocolate supply chains.

Future episode on the entire Mars Corp. They also... Turns out Mars, not a real planet. As of a few days ago, kind is now releasing... It's a globalist lie. A frozen kind bar. What happened in the 90s to go natural that made the health food stop selling uh those bars is probably going to happen to kind

bars in the near future because mars is probably going to buy 10 or 20 more percent of it at some point and then they'll just add more poison to it yeah yeah i mean like i i think there is a trend in um in consumers towards healthy eating like at least at least people with disposable income and the option are more and more opting to eat healthy so i think from a marketing perspective they'll they'll probably stay the way they are but i do think it is uh disturbing how just by like pretending that our entire branding is based around kindness they're able to totally avoid any fair trade any sourcing any anybody taking a look at their supply chains they're just able to avoid that through sheer power of through sheer triumph of the will as

it were they have been able to uh avoid any any looks at this and also just through their, you know, they're able to avoid this kind of scrutiny of their supply chains, but also of their charitable giving. It's fascinating how most billionaire, when you talk about like a billionaire innovator, their biggest innovation is in lying. Yes. And I mean, we haven't even discussed the fact that the bars themselves, I believe almost all of them have almonds in lying. Yes. And I mean, we haven't even discussed the fact that the bars themselves, I believe almost all of them have almonds in it.

There are various combinations of almonds, peanuts, chocolate, cranberries, various fruits, and pecans in some of them as well, as well as chocolate and caramel and so on and so forth. But the almond production uses a fucking dickload of water.

Like 10% of California's clean water goes to their almond production. Yeah, it's very fucked up, almond production in California. And I did want to just mention their charitable giving thing. Because again, you know, we played the commercial. This is a big part of their branding. And I just want to quote a little bit from a write-up on greenstarproject.org in 2018. Oh, hold on. I just remember that people get mad if we don't play enough drops.

So, um... Bob Dole. Continue. Greenstarproject.org. So this is just a write-up in 2018 of their charitable giving. I'm quoting now. They donate 10... Kind Bar.

They donate $10,000 per month. So that's about $120,000 per year or 0.06% of their sales revenue for 2013. Probably about 0.02% of their 2016 revenue. This is a very small fraction of the amount donated by companies that have joined the 1% for the planet program. For example, Clif Bar. Even to take a random example of a large multinational food company, Kellogg's donates around 0.3% of net sales to charitable causes each year.

So they are donating less to charity than fucking Kellogg's or whatever other major multinational you want to name, and yet they are able to brand themselves as the kind... Not so great! They are able to brand themselves as the kind so great they are able to brand themselves as the kind company just through sheer force of will and you know a guy who has like a compelling at least his father had a compelling life story and he just uses his father's life story uses the

fact that it's like if you actually you can look at his twitter he always has inspirational quotes from people you know just the usual, you know, Gandhi or whoever you want to pick, MLK. There's like a Goldman Sachs interview with him and he says something like, you know, moderately inspiring and the interviewer's like, oh, I thought we were going to get

some Danielisms out. He's like, well, you know, I got a couple of them. And like, that's the thing, it's like the fucking narcissism of these goddamn billionaires where every moderately interesting thought, they're like, I gotta put this down in a book, you know.

Let me jot this down real quick. He sounds like the Pete Buttigieg of billionaires. Well, would you like to guess who he is supporting for the President of the United States? Michael Bloomberg? No, apparently, just according to Forbes write-up on

Pete Buttigieg's billionaires, Daniel and Michelle Libetsky have maxed out to Pete Buttigieg. They have given him about $5,600. They also supported Joe Biden and Beto O'Rourke presidential dropout. R.A.P. Yeah. And I just wanted to quote from Forbes' other notable contributions. They've given $10,000 to the Kentucky State Democratic Central Executive Committee so I'm

sure they have business in Kentucky the Weld 2020 Presidential Campaign Committee they have maxed out to it sounds like they're like well it's it seems like the dining room of the Titanic is flooded with water so I propose

we move to the dining room of the Titanic is flooded with water. So I propose we move to the sitting room. But I just like their- I mean, Delegates is welled up to zero. He's getting wiped out. Bill Weld is running in the Republican primary against Donald Trump. And he's lost in a landslide every single time he's been on the ballot.

But they decided to give him $2,800 for some reason. They could have given it to us. Honestly, this is probably some of the best work this guy's done. It's just supporting all of these dead-end candidates. But I guess with the time we have left, we can talk a little bit about palm oil.

It's something I did want to mention while we were here. Uh, cause again, we also mentioned it on the Giovanni Ferraro episode, but it's worth revisiting these things because, you know, in terms of like the damage these people are doing,

I think chocolate and palm oil are definitely numbers one and two. Yeah. And the entire reason they use palm oil is because it has a better shelf life. So they can use any oil, but it would make it so that their products would expire faster. Right. And just quoting from that same greenstarproject.org write up, palm oil is an ingredient in many of their bars. It's near the top of the ingredients list. They use a lot of it. Kind passes this off saying they are a member of

the round table of sustainable palm oil. That means almost nothing. Almost every major food company is a member of the round table of sustainable palm oil that means almost nothing almost every major food company is a member of the round table of sustainable palm oil as i mentioned in this post on palm oil the round table has been widely criticized for poor enforcement and weak guidelines round a round table with billionaires all sitting around it it's like so it is agreed slaves uh and just to talk about uh very quickly about palm oil and what it's been doing i wanted to quote from a qz.com write-up um they say kind of like how you know soybean production has resulted in a lot of uh people burning fires in the amazon rainforest in order to clear land for soybean production, a very similar thing has happened in Indonesia.

Because who's already living there who has any political power? According to QZ.com, Indonesia supplies 56% of the world's palm oil as of the most recent count. The forests are burned deliberately by palm oil producers each year, but this year's burns, I believe this is a 2019 article, but this year's burns are especially destructive

due to drier conditions that are causing the fires to burn out of control. Between 2001- In the South Pacific? There's a lot of fires? Between 2001 and 2018, Indonesia lost 16% of its tree cover, or nearly 26 million hectares of forest, according to a database kept by Global Forest Watch. The loss of these forests resulted in the release of the equivalent of about 10.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions.

And then just the very horrifying kicker paragraph I will quote from here. That's one of those numbers where you just don't have a mental reference. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't make any fucking sense. Yeah, I guess that sounds big. Right, right. Yeah, I did just say 10.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide. Like, this is bad, people.

I don't know the reference numbers, but when I hear gigatons, I get nervous. I'm picturing a lot of crates uh with poison that's now in the air some i'm not sure how those connect but i it feels bad feels like it should be bad oh guys just just so you know um the crude palm oil futures are skyrocketing right now wow skyrocketing well so like from july of last year to now it's gone from about 550 dollars per metric ton up to almost 800 wow yeah yeah and this might have something to do with again this last paragraph wait does that have anything to do with current supply line issues or is that i think it might have anything to do with current supply line issues, or is that... I think it might have something to do with China and Malaysia. Okay.

Like, their supply chains are disrupted from, like, you know, coronavirus and all that shit. It is interesting that for the last several years, David Harvey was saying that, yeah, you know, if anything happens to the Chinese economy, that's kind of the end of it for the world economy, and now it's like, oh, here we go. But just like one last paragraph in this QZ article, again, to put the deforestation in Indonesia in perspective.

From 2008 to 2010, palm oil plantations were responsible for almost 60 percent of all deforestation in the country. Now that figure in 2019 is closer to 25%, according to a Duke University study. But that is not because the overall rate of deforestation has decreased. On the contrary, deforestation has increased in Indonesia overall, but now factors like drought are playing a growing role. So, you know, it is just something where... That probably has something to do with coronavirus.

Yeah, we'll also think the trade, like the war between us and china was also going on still then right but like this this fucking guy a kind bar discloses nothing about how they're sourcing their palm oil so in all likelihood they're getting it from these fucking illegal plantations caused by, you know, burning the forest to the ground. Palm oil is responsible, was responsible for about 60% of all deforestation. And now the only reason palm oil is responsible for less, for 25%, is because global warming drought is making up the difference. Oh yeah, that's right, California droughts. How can a multi-billion dollar company have the resources to check up on their supply lines?

I am not getting paid to reply to everyone on the internet who raises this issue. They just couldn't think of anything better to do with that $2,800 they gave to Bill Weld's presidential campaign. Just literally putting money in your fucking toilet pipes.

You could have bought Palm oil futures Get on the ground floor Of the very thing that's disrupting your business Go to where the money's going Not to where the money is He also does that thing where he calls The employees of kind

Family, you know, team members I'm so glad I didn't get that job When I worked at Whole Foods, they called us all team members and they would also fire you if you attempted to unionize. But this business insider piece talks about how the kind CEO asked for two months notice from departing employees and up to two year notice. Hey, what are you going to do in two years?

I don't know, maybe quit this job. You know what that says to me when I'm at a job like that? Same day notice. And I mean, this guy, in his book, he talks about how he really allows his failures to inspire his good ideas. And so from this Inc.com profile, he talks about some awful ideas.

And this is a direct quote from, One time I thought we should start a Peace Works Cafe in New York City. A customer would pay for two lunches, one for himself and one for a homeless person, and then have lunch with that homeless person. I thought this would be a great innovative way to connect people and help them discover each other's humanity. I was absolutely serious. My team pointed out all the reasons it wouldn't work, and I realized it was not achievable. But he could have had a homeless person tell him the truth about Lyndon LaRouche and Tower 7.

I mean, he also does this thing where he gives his employee kind awesome cards. You don't need someone to tell you the truth about Lyndon LaRouche. You need Lyndon LaRouche to tell you the truth. Kind awesome cards are like you see someone do something nice, and you give them a card, and it's like a coupon for a kind bar. And then the employee goes, hey, this is much better than a bonus. No, I think the employees are given to give to other strangers. They're supposed to notice other people being kind.

Oh, right. We talked about that. I did notice that. That was a thing at my interview where they're like, free kind bars. And the whole time I was thinking, like, if I take one, is that a trick? Is that one of the interview tricks where they're like, would you like water? And that's test number one. If you say yes, you're fired.

Yeah. I just, I really hate that. You haven't hired me yet. His whole angle of like, I want to promote peace by allowing people to build bridges by doing business with each other and not just,

hey, we're all human fucking beings, so how about we stop killing one another? It's such an obvious glaring thing that like, well, if people are more focused on making money instead of killing one another, then they'll see how people all need money. Well, he even talks about like doing both, like doing good and making money in business. Sorry, this is the last thing I want you to mention about the book.

He fucking opens this stupid fucking book by being like, at our company, we make sure to do something very specific where instead of saying or, we choose to ask yes and. So instead of let's be a company that works with Palestinians or Israelis, why not a company that works with Palestinians and Israelis? Instead of being a company that promotes health foods and is good for the like he fucking took the improv concept of yes and and made it into a business pillar of his goddamn corporation my favorite is one like uh i mean i know he's not an israeli-based company when we try to sell when we try to sell kind bars we we think, okay, what is our customer's characters? What is our customer's relationship? What is our customer's objective? And when is this taking place? Where?

I was just going to say, my favorite thing with like Israeli companies is, you know, they'll say, oh, we're doing such a charitable thing employing Palestinians, you know, in Gaza, where it's like 50% unemployment. It's like, yeah, they're in a great labor bargaining position when they deal with us and we could just report them to our government and they'll lose their license to cross the border and make a living for their family at any moment. Yes. He actively campaigning for them to end the blockade or is he just taking full advantage of it?

Well, he is not. I didn't research his position that much, but he has not said anything to my knowledge of ending the blockade in Gaza. We could advocate for an Israeli state or a Palestinian state, or we could advocate for an Israeli state and a Palestinian state.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, the dude's a major change. And the status quo is making me a lot of money. But yeah, I mean, and I guess just to kind of move towards closing out here, I did want to just briefly revisit the supply chain thing. GreenStarProject.org, again, the same write-up. Their cacao is not certified and no information is provided on sustainability or supply chain.

Shade-grown? Organic? Slavery free supply chain? Fair trade? Sometimes it's easy to overlook the lack of certifications on a label or ingredient list. In fact, there's no information available on sourcing or sustainability of any of their ingredients, either on the label or on their website. So, I mean, it's like this company that their entire thing is branding themselves about their kindness. If they didn't have slavery in their supply chain they would brag about it they would talk about their certifications but they don't have them so you can basically a hundred percent assume that they are

using the uh worst and most illegal uh sources of cacao and palm oil and still charging like two dollars a fucking bar for these things what if if they split the difference and were like we have some of the kindest slavery. We don't use whips. We find a motivational tool where we use slavery and positive reinforcement. Yes, and you can work 80 hours and

another 20 hours. Yes, and we'll teach you how to read the instructions on the machinery. And I guess I just wanted to, last thing I have is talk about his personal politics a bit, which is at least as far as what he says publicly, kind of a munch mushy liberal centrism, which is unsurprisingly that he donates to people like Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden. He gives an interview to Yahoo Finance in 2019, where he says, quote, the problem in our society is that we're getting hijacked by extremism. Across the world,

the rise of totalitarian thugs and dictators, and in the United States, the increasing strength of the extremes. And so when he says the increasing strengths of the extremes, he's of course referring to, in addition to Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders in the United States. He doesn't say Bernie's name, but it's very clear what he means. Quoting from him, this tiny amount of extremists wake up in the morning and they think, how can I advance my cause? And they want to stop at nothing. The vast majority of people are moderates, but they wake up in the morning and they think, what can I have for breakfast? Extremist versus moderates is not whether you're from the left or whether you're from the right or whether you're from the center. It's from anybody. You can be a conservative and be able to listen to the other

side. You can be a progressive and be able to listen to the other side. It's when we stop listening and we think that we have all the answers that we start getting into trouble a lot of ands in that sentence and if you guys notice this yeah i did you could be one and the other thing i mean oh this guy's this guy's realization that copays and premiums barney sanders a jewish individual and an anti-Semite. And I guess just the last thing I wanted to quote is he writes this blog at peaceworks.net.

blog.peaceworks.net. He opines on various subjects. And I just wanted to quote from a 2016 one where he addresses an op-ed called Anti-Semitism of the Left, which I believe was a New York Times op-ed. And I'm just going to quote from him.

The rise of leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain's opposition Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom support of the Palestinians is uncritical. Like, that's a bad thing. And for whom, in the words of Alan Johnson, a British Palestinian Islamist, Raheel Salah, who has suggested Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on 9-11. Corbyn called him an honored citizen. The quote-unquote Corbynistas on British campuses extolled their fight against the quote-unquote racist colonization of Palestine, which again, where would anybody get this idea? As one Oxford student, James Elliott, put it,

Elliott was narrowly defeated last month in a bid to become youth representative on Labor's National Executive Committee. So he's using James Elliott, who lost a bid to be on Labor's National Executive Committee, and who called the quote-unquote racist colonization of Palestine. He's using that as an example of an anti-Semitic extremist on the Labor Party. And where would people get the idea of a racist colonization of Palestine? And you can ask any Palestinian who has attempted to build anything in the fucking West Bank, because they will deny your building permit if you are not ethnically Jewish. They will bulldoze your fucking house if you are not ethnically jewish uh if you are one of the palestinians living in the occupied west bank or gaza good luck voting in those israeli israeli elections like this is why we call it apartheid it is

these are bantu stands their destiny there's a blockade their lives are completely controlled by the israeli government and they have no input into the leadership of that government gaza is bombed on the regular um something where if it happened anywhere else it would be called by the international community a genocide anywhere else besides yemen right from daniel lebowski what is striking about the anti-zionism derangement syndrome that spills over into anti-seemitism is its ahistorical nature. It denies the long Jewish presence in and bond with the Holy Land. It disregards the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism and the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe. Dismisses the

legal basis for the modern Jewish state in UN Resolution 181 of 1947. Hey, have the borders changed since the UN Resolution of 1947? That's your legal basis, apparently. And he says, you know, it's not colonialism, but a quote-unquote post-Holocaust view of the world. Arab armies went to war against it and lost. And, you know, he says... I think a better post-Holoust view of the world is hey let's stop doing genocides but you know to each their own uh and yeah he says you know criticism is

israel is needed in vigorous form but a demonization of uh jewish people is a very different thing and of course by implication he's saying jeremy corbin and the british labor party are engaged in that so this is the kind of guy who's throwing around you know millions of dollars in and claiming that he's being kind about it what a fucking chooch babe i can eat out your box and eat your butt uh louie's back ladies and gentlemen can't be a gross episode without me talking about butt uh but i think that gives you a good idea of daniel lebetsky i think that gives you a good idea of um the supply chains that go into kind bars the horrific environmental destruction and

labor abuses and their entire marketing campaign is how kind and decent they are. So don't buy the bullshit. So before we close out the episode, we wanted to mention a comedy friend of myself, Andy and Yogi, who passed away. Of course, the very funny comedian, Steve Whalen, known as Mr. Jokes, who was a person that we were all very familiar with, just doing comedy in New York City, has very sadly passed away.

And we wanted to just briefly mention him and his life and what it has meant for the three of us. Yeah, I remember when I came to New York, you meet people at mics that you'll never forget, and sometimes they're just random wackos that talk about conspiracy theories. Most of the time. Sure.

But Steve Whalen was a... How do you think this podcast was formed? He's one of the guys you... Oh, sorry. No, you're right. Whalen was one of those guys that had a lounge singer, a giant personality, and could command any mic, however good or bad the mic was going. And some people are so dedicated to their character, you almost forget that they're

people when they get off stage, because that's the type of person Steve Bowen was. Yeah, he is, to build on that, you know, one of many people were stuck in the kind of introspective side of comedy. I don't mean to define him in a negative way, but he was able to just bring fun to comedy. He would pop his mic under his leg and go, new mic trick. He embodied silliness. There's a lot of stand-up right now that's very trendy and edgy and cool. And Waylon realized how empty that was, I think. And when you get to see a performer

that truly loves silliness and being silly for humor's sake but not take themselves so seriously like Steve did, it connects to people in a way that writing the best joke about the Holocaust doesn't, Sean. He had a great love for comedy. And, you know, you see that in his love for, like, the vaudeville

and the old Catskills tradition and his love for Rodney Dangerfield and just kind of like the jokes he would tell about, you know, his agent and his mother-in-law, which are like kind of a throwback. But it's just so, I guess, when you see it, particularly if you know the history of comedy, it's so refreshing and there's such a love and a joy there in the history of stand-up comedy in the United States. You know, just people where, you know, even the old kind of, let's say, cliched mother-in-law jokes, they have a warm familiarity about them when he delivered them. And it was always so good to see him at a show or an open mic or whatever else and i'm just gonna miss seeing him around and even even outside of his comedy the one

time that i saw him really break character and it was it was on social media but it was actually uh how i found out uh the first thing i saw about um the death of Eric Garner, he made a post about where he was just completely disgusted by it. And it was some post because he was from Staten Island. And he just said something about like Staten Island being a bastion of hate was his response to just his immediate visceral response to what had happened to that man. I think that that kind of spoke to his heart, to put it in a corny way. I mean, that sounds corny, but he really, beyond also being the guy

who had the zingers, who was nice, a very sweet guy to everyone very fun to talk to um i once got uh his i love this crowd shirt and he was like yeah i had some extra so here it is for a discount like you know that was just kind of guy he was and even even beyond that like it wasn't superficial he was a sweet guy he he he was a very kind guy and i he uh i don't know what happened but i don't think that matters i think what matters is way too young um and he should still be with us and he's not and that's um that's tragic i was gonna tell a magic the gathering story about him but kind of hard to

top that eric garner thing for uh epitomizing the seriousness of his legacy go ahead the decency of his I was just gonna say I like so I didn't know him that well we would see each other at shows and stuff but he's always very kind very funny and uh one time he saw me wearing a Magic the Gathering shirt because he also played Magic the Gathering which had the is it which is the blue red color combination logo and he said ah Sean I should have known you would be an is-it elitist. Apparently he played Simic, blue-green. But we played Magic a couple times.

But he was... God, I'm just really going to miss him. And, you know, between him and Raghav and all our fucking comedian friends dying. The thing I've loved the most about this has been seeing the amount of comics that have written about every

great memory they've had with them and you don't realize how much a person means to a scene until something like this happens which is devastating but at the same time it's very easy to forget that people remember the kind things you do.

I've realized the only time I log on to Facebook anymore is when one of my friends dies. So I think Mark Zuckerberg is killing my friends. Because, you know, you get to see all your friends and people you know just share all these different memories about him in a way that you don't really get in other social media platforms. And, I mean, it's just, it's very sad, but it's heartening to read about what a what a

good person he was and all the different uh people that i love who uh who loved him and whose lives were enhanced by knowing him and i think um yeah uh we'll we'll sign out and then i think uh it's okay we play a few minutes um at the tail end of his sizzle reel sure absolutely and with that this yes and with that this has been Grub Stakers I'm Yogi Poyle I'm Andy Palmer I'm Steve Jeffers I'm Sean P McCarthy Steve Whalen actually a kind bar what did you what did you write today? What a crowd! I love this crowd.

Give it up for yourselves. Take it easy on me, folks. It's hard out there for a guy dressed like a 12-year-old. Dating is very difficult for me. I took a woman on a date recently. She said, can I buy a bottle of wine? I said, go ahead, baby. Do whatever you want to do.

She left. It's hard for me to relate to women, to relate to their interests. Took a woman on a date. She said, I love to cook. I said, that's great. I love to eat. She said, I love to go biking.

I said, that's great. I love to eat. I took a woman on an online date recently. Has this ever happened to you? She looks nothing like her profile picture. This happened to me. In her profile picture, she wasn't crying. I'm having trouble with the ladies.

Last night at 2 a.m., I texted a woman, you up? She texted back, no, I am not up. I've never had success with the ladies. I asked my second cousin to prom because the first one turned me down. It's hard to be intimate when you're a fat guy like me. I asked a woman to put her arms around me. She said she had to be at work early the next day. But enough about the sex jokes, right? Sex this, sex that. I'm one of those guys.

I don't like sex. I've made up my mind. But maybe I shouldn't knock it until I try it. Am I right, fellas? You know what's really hurting me? I'm fat, I'm not gonna lie. I'm a big fat guy. I'm not gonna lie. You wanna know how fat I am?

How fat are you? I'm glad you asked. I'm so fat I went to Burger King and I overthrew him. That's how fat I am. So fat I had an intervention recently. They said, Steve, you're here for overeating. I said, great, let's get started. You think I'm feeling the pressure. What about this stage, alright? I'm not that fat, I just retain french fries, how you doing? I try to lose weight, I'm on the paleo diet, me and my pal Leo eat mozzarella sticks. Don't be shy, don't be shy.

Ma'am, is that your boyfriend? Yeah. Sorry? Yes. No, I heard you, I just said I'm sorry. Maddie, ladies in the crowd. Ma'am, are you into desperate gas? Uh, no. Please, I'll do anything. Please.

Uh, let's see, what do we got? Ma'am, what do you do for a living? It's dark in here. Electrical contractor. Electrical contractor. Hmm, hmm. You know, I don't do a lot of jokes about electricity. It's hard to stay hip and current, people. There we go.

Yeah, oh, there we go. Woo! We got it. What do you do for a living? You work for a non-profit? Join the club, buddy. Hey, there we go. Thank you.

What do you do for a living? Sure. I design denim. You design denim? I got news for you. They already made denim. You designed denim? I got news for you, they already made denim. Alright! What do you do for a living?

What is this, a corporate gig for non-profits? Oh, she works there too! Alright! Man, what's your favorite TV show? Uh, True Blood? True Blood, that's on HBO, right? Well that's weird because you look more like a fox to me. You watch TV?

Of course. What's your favorite TV show? The Biggest Loser. Save it for the professionals.