The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The $10,000,000 Chef Who Beat Popeyes | Joshua Weissman

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

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Amazon presents, Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Josh Weissman has completely changed the restaurant industry by taking everything they do and then making it better and cheaper.

Today we're getting an inside look on the secrets of the restaurant industry. They definitely do illegal shit in that world. How you're able to make the best meals on a budget and how he was able to turn his passion for cooking into a multi-million dollar business. But first, we got to thank our sponsor, ORA. As you might have noticed, a lot of our guests have always talked about the importance of getting a good night of sleep. And I always thought that I was sleeping just fine until ORA sent me their sleep. sleep tracking ring and then I realized how bad of a sleeper I guess I am and how many times I'm waking up in the middle of the night. So being able to track my sleep has been incredibly important

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improve. They also track your heart rate, heart rate variability, and oxygen levels when you sleep. Orah also has tons of other cool features like activity tracking, temperature variations, and more. So check out ORA with the link down below in the description. Thank you so much, or for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast. Enjoy. Welcome back to the Ice Coffee Hour. I'm Joshua Weissman and I cook food. Welcome to the Iceman.

Welcome. What brings you out to Vegas? I was doing a little cooking thing with, I don't know if you guys know Jean-George. He's like a huge, so, I mean, a juggernaut in the chef space. This guy's, I don't even know how he's managed to do what he does, but he has multiple Michelin-Star restaurants. He has like 50 or 60 restaurants now.

I studied him a bunch when I was a kid, and they randomly reached out. I was like, hey, John George, like, watches you. you want to hang out and like do some stuff and so we came out and film the video it was super fun can you tell us about the video yeah yeah yeah so basically the concept was can i beat a michelin chef uh so we did like chopping competitions and like a bunch of other things and we made like a plate i had to like come up with a dish he he got to use one of the dishes that was already at the restaurant so i felt a little disadvantaged there but i came with a dish and like put it together and we went to head to head and you'll have to watch the video to see what happens who judges that though

uh we had uh a bunch of blindfolded taste testers coming in right pick a dish. It was a steak dish. How do you think you did going into it? Like before I got there? Yeah. Well, before you got judged. Like after you made the meal. You know, I hate to say it because everybody's usually like, God, Josh has a big ego. Well, you're right.

I walked in feeling just fine. But, you know, I think that I will say that I think that there is an element to like being successful in a scenario like that, right? In the same way with athletes too, right? I'm not saying that I'm, you know, back to like an athlete. If I can run like two minutes and I'm done. But I think the mentality aspect helps me do well in scenarios like that, you know, high pressure But I don't know. I felt fine. I felt like I was going to do well. I didn't know if I would win or not, but I didn't really care because it's like this guy's been

Cooking professionally and has had his own restaurant an entire restaurant group for like 50 years So how old is this guy? He's 60. Okay and what does it mean Michelin star? What is I I always hear it, but I've honestly no idea what that means Really? So it's kind of a it's kind of a weird mysterious things. So we know Michelin tires. It comes from the tire company guys. Is it real sorry? It does. It does. It does. It's 100% the exact same company. So I will say that there's a little bit of a weird element to it. But I think it took off where Michelin started a guide where they're like, okay, we sell tires. We want to incentivize selling tires. This is my assumption in their boardroom meeting here. And they said they decided, okay, well, we'll make a system where we'll give a bunch of recommendations of great places to

eat and bed and breakfast and whatnot for you to stop at along your trip using Michelin tires. No. And that was kind of the whole element of it. But it became its own thing. So this is why I still respected to an extent. It became its own thing because people started desiring these sort of unattainable ratings where it was like one, two, three stars, right?

And then it kind of fell into fine dining where it was, you know, one star is just for great food. Two stars is great food and great service. Three stars is like everything, it's like the symphony of a restaurant being utterly perfect from bottom to the top. If someone drops a napkin, it gets picked up within a certain amount of time. If somebody like, you know, the forks and knives are always placed in the right spot every single time, did the waiter or waitress check on you? And when they checked on you, how did they check on you? And like, that's just a fraction of the level of intricacy that they look for. And so it ended up becoming this really sort of difficult to acquire a word and human beings love that. So, you know, everybody's like, oh, well,

I want a Michelin Star. I'd love to have one as well. So, I mean, I get it. Have you been to a three Michelin Star restaurant? Yes. I've been to a couple different ones. There's one, I don't know if they still have three stars. There's one in San Francisco called Sazon. So expensive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, easily eat without drinks like $750 a person. No, $750.000? I'm pretty sure. Yeah. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure they're the most expensive Michelin Restaurant in America because most on, I think their average tab is like a thousand person or something like that. A person. Yeah.

What do you get for a thousand dollars? I mean, it depends on where you go. But with, oh, with Cézon. Yeah. So, I mean, you're going to get like multiple, multiple courses, not five courses or six courses, probably closer to 12 or maybe even 15. You might be dining for three or four hours. Are you serious?

Your ass will get sweaty. I'll tell you right now. Can I say that on this podcast? Yeah, you can say sweaty. Okay. great news so yeah i mean some of these restaurants actually have rest areas so you'll go in and i i love it personally it is gaudy as what it is it is honestly really fun what this is it's kind of like a spa you know you go to a spa right and it's kind of unnecessarily catered to you in a

way where it's like they lift your arm and do everything for you they lift your arm for you no no no no i'm i'm i'm bringing up the concept of a spa imagine imagine the server just chewing the food for And then they baby bird. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And then they give you like a gift card now. So the concept is like you're catered to at every woman in most scenario. So like there are some places where you'd go and you'd eat for maybe an hour. And then they'd go, okay, cool.

Now you're going to go over to the espresso bar. So they'll move you over. There's a rest area. There's some couches, like really nice modern couches. Maybe they have like something to read or whatever. They give you a small espresso and then maybe like a juice or something refreshing. Sit there for about 10 minutes. And then they'll escort you back to your table.

And then your tables reset with different plates and different silverware for the next set of courses. Like it's like high, high, high, fine-diting. How often do people go to a restaurant like that? Is that like a once a month sort of deal? If you have the money or it's like once a year, that sounds exhausting to me. Yeah. I think it's more of like something you go and do every once in a while. You know, you go go-karting every once in a while.

You go to the fancy restaurant every once in a while. So are most three-star Michelin restaurants like that where they have rest areas? or is that just a one-off? I would say that's not most of them. Okay. Most of them are like, you know, they're restaurants, but they're just really, really high-level food or really high-level cuisine.

There's usually other elements to it, though. I mean, another comparison I can make is, I try to remember the name of it, 11 Madison. Are you guys familiar with 11 Madison? Yeah, yeah. It's actually one of the largest three Michelin-Star restaurants in the world.

Typically, higher quality, less seats. They want consistency. They're going to have less seats. Most Michelin restaurants are like 40 seats and under because they just don't want to deal with, like, having to do shit. It's a food like that. Yeah.

I think 150, 200 or something like that. 70 people on the line. 70 people, or maybe 50 or 70 or something like that, some ridiculous amount. Yeah. Of people that are cooking. But their experience is very much like catered to you. Like sometimes, I think one of my friends went and his dad is like knows the community there pretty well. He went in and they were talking about F1 and they were having their meal. And it was basically. off the menu nothing too crazy and it was like a like a 10 course menu or something like that all vegetables and the waiter overheard them talking about f1 and so for their dessert they got a bunch of f1 inspired desserts and then got a f1 cookie of like a bunch of f1 cars like as a gift to leave with and a little gift baggy isn't that the place where they like they ask you about yourself and you tell them like your interests or whatever and then they can because i swear i heard about a michelin star restaurant that will like go figure out your interest so they know that they can converse with

about certain topics. I've actually never eaten at 11. I'm only talking about someone else's experience. I'm not 100% sure. But I mean, wouldn't be surprised if they did that. But the point is like each experience is going to be different

depending on the restaurant you go to. You know, some places might have a rest area. Some places might just be a restaurant and the food is insane. You know, the French laundry, you go and you eat, you leave. But they usually give you like gifts and stuff like that when you leave.

And how much do the employees make do you know at these? Nothing. Really? Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm going to kind of get it in the conversation of experience is, you know what I mean? Back in the day when I was working, you know, as a young line cook, I would have taken pretty much any pay to work at any of these

places. And that's how most people feel. But you'll find that there's not a ton of people that are able to do that because affordability, right? A lot of the people that are working at these places have one of two or three things. Either one, they have good friends that they can sleep on their couch and stuff like that. Two, they have money saved up and they can pay rent. Or maybe they are paid well. It's getting better. There are places that pay enough to afford rent. But third, the higher the restaurant, sometimes they'll pay much less than you could imagine. And most people can't afford rent. Like I wanted to work at this one restaurant that shan't be named.

This was years and years and years ago. Three Michelin Star in San Francisco. And they actually gave me a job offer because one of my old chefs knew them. And he was like, oh, this guy's talented like he likes your restaurant. You should consider him. And they gave me an offer. But they were like, well, first you need to stage. And staging is like an unpaid internship.

You come in for like a day or two and show them what you got and then you leave and then they decide if they're going to hire you. They said that the stage is two months, two months, no pay, zero. They wanted me to work four days a week and stage two months in San Francisco as a line cook. How was that legal? They just call it something different, like an internship? I have no clue. Okay. I have no clue.

They definitely do illegal shit in that world. It is getting better and it's been getting cracked down on, I would say. Okay. So that's the good part. But, yeah. So that gives you an example of kind of like what. Most of the people are going to be getting paid anywhere from 12 to maybe 17 an hour. Wow.

But the servers make probably a lot, right? Because they're tips. Yeah. Sometimes they share tips, but it's rare. If they're not sharing tips, then yeah, servers make bank. Servers can make six figures. Yeah. Pretty easily.

Yeah, we know a few servers here on the strip who would easily make about $150, maybe as high as $200,000 a year. Just working at a really high-end restaurant. Some of the tabs are insane. Yep. We went out to dinner last night. I'm not going to sure where, but, you know, where. But the table across from us got a $5,300 bottle, $5,300 bottle of sake.

One bottle. $5,300. That's insane. So you could imagine the tip on top of that plus food, plus other drinks, plus everything else. Just two people. Yeah, especially if it's like a large party. That's when it gets crazy in some of these restaurants. One of the restaurants I worked at, there was, I think it was like a 20 top that came in,

So 20 seats, 20 people sitting in seats. And they ordered all of the most expensive shit and the most expensive bottles of like wine and champagne. Let me tell you something. Whatever you're paying for champagne and wine at these restaurants is like 5 to 600% of what it actually is. There was a bottle of one of the restaurants that were, and I like the champagne, but it's sold at the grocery store for,

well, actually I'll tell you what we sold it for first. So the restaurant sold it for, $75 a bottle, which is like not exorbitant. That's affordable for some people, but at the store, it's $12. $12 at the store, selling it for $75. But is that why they charge the corkage fees? So if you bring your own in. Yes.

Because they'll bring your own wine in? A lot of times. Yeah. Yeah. And they'll charge corkage fees so that they can make money off. It's usually like 30 bucks. Yeah. So it could be more than the cost it would take just to go by the bottle or is that like per

per table? So like if you bring in like three. bottles. Believe it's per bottle. Yeah, it's per bottle. I could be wrong. So it's worth it if you bring in a really expensive bottle, like a $500 bottle, then you'll save a lot of money. Most restaurants are profitable, are profitable because of alcohol. That's why? Most of them. I'm not saying that that's the only reason. I'm just saying that the reason why they pass over margins and get at least a decent payout is alcohol. Because food is tough to make profitable. It's very hard. You have to balance your menu. There's like how much is your food cost, what's your overhead, et cetera, et cetera.

How long does it take to make some of these things? A lot of fine dining places are not profitable. Like there's a lot of Michelin-starred restaurants that are not profitable, but there's just somebody who has a lot of money that owns it. Wow. But you know what? Before we go into that, I want to say a huge thank you to our sponsor of Streamyard. You know, in the beginning stages, when it comes to making content,

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Where did you first find interest in cooking? And yeah, a little bit about the timeline. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I feel like a lot of people don't believe me, but I started cooking when I was like four, like four or five probably, like legitimately cooking regularly. My mom brought me and my mom cooks a lot.

She's from the South. She's chicken fried steak and she's making ribs and she's making cream gravy and this and stuff. And she's amazing, really, very, very, very talented cook. And so that interested me. It was the one place I could go and make a mess. there's one place I could go and make a mess and just kind of like, you know, pick up a knife and chop up. In what other scenario as a kid can you do that, right?

Everywhere else, everybody tells you know, but the kitchen's the one place you could do that. So that was exciting to me. So I started doing that for a little bit. And my mom could tell I took interest in it. So she kept kind of like fuel in the fire. She'd get me a little knife. She gave me like a cutting board. And I think at around 10, I was like, this is definitely my thing because I was good at it.

Pretty much right out the gate. And it's fun. funny, I feel like, especially now actually, like 10 year olds are very self-conscious about what they're going to be doing and what they're going to be. I don't know if you guys have like interviewed a 10 year old, but I, not yet, but like been around kids though where they're talking like, you know, my, my fiance's cousins and stuff and and nieces and nephews, like the way that they talk, I'm like, they're really stressed out about their future. You're like 10, bro. I was as well. And so to me, I was like, I'm not good at a lot of other things.

I'm really good at this. This is definitely my thing. And from then on, I had decided I was like, I'm gonna figure out how to make this into something that is good. So by 10, you had that figured out. Yeah. What was it about cooking that drew you to that?

I think it was, it was the element of something that I knew that I was way better at adults. And I knew, you know, the age gap, my mind kind of went there. I think that there's something here. And I wanna be good at something. And I wasn't good at something. to video games. Thank God. And that was like the main draw is that I enjoyed it so much.

And there was never a time that I was bored and I was good at it. And I knew that then. And I was, I think I didn't want to waste time trying to look for something else. Like, oh, is there something better out there? My mind was like, I could do this forever and always be happy. So why would I do anything else? How did your parents foster that growth? Were they encouraging of you, like making your own lunch or cooking dinners?

That's a good question. They were extremely supportive. I mean, I mean, it kind of behooved them, right? Because I cook them dinner like every night. But I mean, I love that. But I'll give you some examples as to how they nurtured it though. Because they definitely did, like more so than they had to. They spent a lot of money on like unnecessary, expensive things like kitchen knives and fancy equipment that I use like once.

And then through in the garage, I was like, oh, cool, a weird little juicer thing. And then, you know, never used it again. On my 16th birthday, you know, got my license and all that. And I asked, they're like, oh, what do you want? what do you want to get, you know, for your 16th birthday? And I was like, I just want like a whole pig. And my mom was like, no, absolutely not. Like, not, I mean, she was like cool with it in the sense of, I guess,

but she really didn't want to deal with it. She's like, all right, let me see if I can find something else. My dad went ahead and got it. And then so she didn't know. And I'm like in the kitchen and my mom walks, there was like 6 or 7 p.m. My mom was like out doing other stuff. She comes in and I'm like midway like with a bone saw

Cutting the leg off this pig It's dead for the record everybody just so you know Why do you buy a pig? Like a full Farm? Yeah Is it at all or no? Well usually. Okay.

Yeah usually it would be you can't You imagine just plop it down like a From an animal butchery standpoint you cannot Show up with like an untaking care of pig because like you have to kind of like get that stuff out of there you don't want to let it sit yeah so it was like gutted and everything and like the hair was like but not torched off no it was the hair was torched off yeah so it was like burnt and it was bald it's like a naked giant naked mole rat gutted yeah yeah basically and that was your 16th birthday present yeah yeah um but why why did you

want a pig i want so i wanted to learn how to do whole animal butchery i think i you know at 16 I had done a lot of research by then. From 10 to 16, I was like doing exorbitant amounts of research. I bought every book I could possibly buy. I read every single one of them several times. I tried as many. I probably cooked like, geez, like two or three different things out of a book every day from 10 to 16. I say every day, you know, maybe there were a couple days where I didn't.

But the point is it was a lot. And I realized I was like, man, how are people, you know, butchering these animals? Google it, all animal butchery. Oh, cool. There's all this information. Well, how am I supposed to put this to use without a whole pig? That was basically it. Whole pig's expensive.

It was like a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars for a pig. Yeah. It was like a heritage breed hog. Why do you need a heritage breed hog? Is that just like a... Better quality meat. Way better quality meat.

And then also just like, I don't know, sustainability. And I don't know. If you're going to like break down a whole pig, do you really want like a shitty quality pig or do you want like the nice stuff? You know, some nice high quality flavor, good intramuscular fat and all that stuff. How do you cook such a big pig? Is there like a... special. I'm curious about that. You can't put that in the oven. I'm just trying to visualize. Yeah, you just slap that bitch in the oven. It's done. Yeah. Sign on. No, you can't. I'm just completely, you cannot. Dude, this thing would take up this whole table. You cannot. Here, I'll tell you this. You can't pick this thing up by yourself unless you're, you're really strong. It's like carrying a dead body. Not that I know what that's like for the record. So how did you cut it? Did you put it on a table and like? Yeah. So I had to take two huge, actually it was I took four huge, um,

Like, you know, those butcher block boards, the really big ones. Yeah. And, like, basically shingled them all together, put the pig on it. And then, you know, I have to kind of like break all the limbs down. Take the legs, take the head, all the other things. And then you start breaking down the primal cuts of meat, which are like those really big pizzas. So pork chop comes from a whole primal cut of meat. It's like an entire, like, where there's multiple chines of bones.

And it's like this entire roast that you slice pork chops from. Yeah. Same thing with beef. It's basically it. So I broke a dine. down into like different cuts and we got my parents had to buy a chest freezer to put it all in there so you can see how supportive they were I mean like most parents in that scenario would be like no absolutely not so they dealt with a lot for me to make that happen was that hard for you at all to

like like actually be visually seeing like because personally for me I know if I had to like kill or like look at the food me too for it was actually just a steak on my plate I know it sounds so terrible I know a lot of People also feel this way. I wouldn't be able to eat it. Totally. I don't think so. I totally get it. I've seen the pig, the pig head and seen the meat too.

I can't do it because I see the pig. Yeah. It's funny. I think that makes complete sense. I think that's also like a very natural human reaction. I also felt that way. But it's sort of like you have a goal and you're going to grind to get to that goal. And so my mentality was like, man, this is a lot.

When I first saw it, initially there was a little bit of a shock factor. I mean, it's an animal. But in my mind, I'm like, look, I really want to get good at this. Like, I have to learn this stuff. And I have to know how this works. How can I call myself like a professional that cares about what I do and not know where these things come from, how to care for them? And I will say one thing.

It's built up the respect that I have for the food when I cook it. That's why I don't get up when I'm cooking. Like, my initial thought is this came from an animal. The animal had to die for this. And there's a whole sort of ethics behind being, you know, a chef, so to speak, and I think giving respect to the ingredients is only going to be earned when you really see that and you understand that. So there's that aspect, and, but, you know, I was willing to deal with it to learn it. But I won't say that I loved it. You know, it's not like I was there,

like, you know, Carpenter just pickup, like, with a smile on my face. I was definitely, there were some parts where I was just like, man, this is a little bit much. Taking the head off was rough. It was tough for me the first time I did it. After a while, you get desensitized, then you don't really care that I'll say like if you start butchering whole animals in a restaurant which I I never did but there were there were a couple restaurants I worked for that did whole animal butchery and you see it so often that when someone slings a pig over their shoulder two guys sling pig over their shoulder then carry it in it's not really a big deal you know you see it every single sure but one of my first restaurants that I worked and I walked in and they had a whole pig that they had

roasted the whole thing and and one of the line cooks comes up to me and he had the head in its end after it was roasted and he's like he's like look man we just roasted this and I was like oh I literally just got it there's a little too much for me right now man and then the jaw just kind of went like and then fell off and I was just like oh my god oh my god so yeah yikes all right there you go welcome to horror hour how long did it take you to eat the whole pig I imagine that you just served this over many weeks probably months yeah yeah there's a lot there was a lot. And I mean, we froze it all. Yeah. Um, so some of it I made, I made like bacon. Like, cured the pork belly and then like smoked it and sliced it and made like actual like bacon.

Um, I tried to cure the legs. They didn't really work. Um, we wrote, we made one of the legs into a ham, like a giant like ham. And yeah, it took probably a few months, like six months. Okay. A lot. And then what about throughout high school? Were you working part time at restaurants, or were you just doing all of this for fun recreationally? It was all recreationally. I would cook for my parents, my friends, but it did get to a point where I wanted to work in restaurants, and they don't, like, it's a big problem in the industry with, like, underage labor, you know, because, like, kids would come in and peel carrots. Like, oh, it's no fun. Can't do that anymore. So I had to wait until I was, like, 18 to work in restaurants. When I moved to Austin was when

I started working. And then, yeah, that was pretty seamless transition of, like, the one thing I was doing when I was a kid that I could get work doing is I was doing, like, food photography stuff. anything I could do to get my hands on to making money working in food. I would do like food photography for like small magazines or e-books. I'd help people do recipe development. I'd write recipes for people, edit recipes. Sometimes I would come on to sets and like be a studio assistant to style food, anything I could do.

And what was your first job? It was working a restaurant. Just like a what, like a line cook or something? Usually your first time you start as a prep cook. So you're like chopping loads of vegetables. When I say a lot, I mean like a lot, like 100 pounds of onions. Wow. You know, there was 300 oranges,

and then you take the oranges and you peel every single one of them with a knife, and then you remove each individual segment from the orange. But 300 of them, though. It might seem like a silly question. If you ever taken a cooking lesson or wanted to go to like a cooking college or like a school for this, like a culinary school? So actually, I never went to school or college. Oh, well, let me rephrase that.

I never went to college. Yeah. I didn't go to culinary school either. I mean, you know, it gets to a point where I was just like, do I really need my parents to spend $100,000 for me to go to culinary school? But I also tried applying to a couple of them, and they all denied me. Why is that? I don't know.

I tried going to, there was one that I wanted, I guess I shouldn't name them, but I applied to someone like the most esteemed culinary schools that there are because I was like, I'm good. Like, I can go here. And then I applied to. some other ones that were local, and I actually applied to a couple of colleges too. I did not want to go to either of them. But I did it anyway because my parents were like, oh, come on, you know, they weren't pushing

me too much, but they were like, you know, let's do it. And all the colleges did not admit me, and none of the culinary schools admitted me. And I was just like, so where do I go? And my parents were like, oh, well, we'll just apply to some more. And then I was like, honestly, I'm good. And totally broke my mom's heart because my mom hasn't had anyone. you know, on her side that's really gotten the chance to do that. And she would have been the first and so she wanted me to do it. And so it was kind of tough for a little bit for her, but she let,

you know, they didn't fight me on it, which was cool. I really appreciated that. And that also goes to show like how much support comes into play here with this. But yeah, I mean, didn't go to college or culinary school for that reason. Wow. And so what was your experience then going from high school to then working full time in the industry? Did that make it less fun for you, knowing that it's now a job? No. I felt like I was getting paid to learn. It was awesome. Yeah. I mean, granted, I was getting paid like $9, $7 to $9 an hour. And I was like, why can't I pay rent? This is confusing. I weren't like 90 hours a week, but, you know, I was a kid. I think in between then, I took like a little bit of time off. I went to Europe for like two and a half

months with all the money that I had saved up and just went around and ate as much as I could, gather as much knowledge as I could. I went into a couple like restaurants and worked in the back of house for a day as a stash in France actually. Um, super mean, very mean. They did not like that I didn't speak French, which I get, I get that. Um, and then when I got back, I think I start, actually, you know what, there's, there's, there's one piece of the story that I forgot to mention, which is, I was doing a food blog at the time, um, just for fun. And it started doing pretty well. And then I randomly got a book deal from this really small publisher. And I was like, all right, I was 17 at the time. And so I was, I was really just doing that. It did all right. It was like, you know, nobody really

knows about it. They know about it now, but back then nobody really knew about it. And then from there, after that, I pretty much spent all of my money when I moved to Austin, like all of it. I didn't have that much. I think I had like saved up 12 grand. Went to Europe, spent half of that. I don't know how I managed to do that in two months. I have no idea. Lived off that. And then spent the rest of it in Austin, had zero dollars. And I was like, time to get a job. And went to restaurants.

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S-Uv-W, German-engineered for all. And you somehow afforded rent on like seven, what was it, like eight bucks an hour? Yeah, so the first one was, I think it was around eight or nine dollars an hour. I don't know. Well, the rent was actually really low. It was this pretty rinky-dinky, like old house, and I think the rent was, man, I could be wrong, but I think it was like $750. It's pretty low.

Especially for Austin. That's really low. Yeah, now that would be what, like $1,800? Oh, easy. My God. Austin is out of control. Yeah, it'd easily be like, it'd probably be like 12, 12 or 1,500 now. But yeah, I just didn't spend money on anything else.

You know, I ate all the food that I needed to eat at the restaurant. And then when I got home, I might have like some cheap things. that I could make like pasta. And then it got to a point where my, my girlfriend at the time, now fiancé, would help me pay rent, which if you're wondering, that's why she's my fiance now. Pass the test. Yeah, past the test.

I mean, you know, I don't think it's required to pay your SO's rent, but she helped a bunch. So that's cool. Then where did the concept come for your YouTube channel? So I'm trying to remember how that's, basically when I was working, I'd gone through, working through a few different restaurants, lots of fine dining.

I got my experience. I was getting good and I was getting like known in the community and I was knowing a bunch of those chefs and restaurants and I was kind of getting

veering towards like a sous chef position at the current restaurant. Once you get a sous chef position it's very hard to leave because it's not like you can't quit but it's just the attachment of like how much work it takes to get to that point

you want to like write it out and there's just a certain emotional attachment. I was afraid of that because I was like man if I do this I'm not going to be able to do some of the other things that I wanted, which those things were. I wanted to do like television or shows and visual entertainment essentially because I felt that I did not like the shows that were being put out. I thought they were terrible. I thought it wasn't doing food justice.

I'm like there's so much exciting stuff out there. And I felt that food entertainment was slowly losing the people. And that freaked me out because that also was about as equally important to me as the cooking was. That was something, a passion that I grew over time. My dad's like in film and, or was, he was in film for a number of years. And so that was something that I thought was really important. And so I wanted to contribute to that too. And I'm like, how am I supposed to do that working as a line cook or turn on at the time going into a sousheft position?

How am I supposed to do that working 80 to 90 hours a week? How am I supposed to have time for that? And I was like, well, I mean, I could start on YouTube. I could like make a couple videos and like edit them at night and or in the most of the most. morning instead and call it a day and maybe we'll see where that goes and maybe I can use that to do other stuff. For a year, I slept, I think four hours a night, every single night in order to do that because there was no other way I could find time. Because think about it, you go into the restaurant, if you're working mornings, you go in the restaurant, you get up at five and you shower, get ready,

you get there at six 30 or seven, you prep, you work until probably 530 or 6, and then you get home, it's night time and then you eat and you rinse and repeat but typically you would stay after until like seven sometimes i would stay until seven to like learn right but if you're on the line then you come in and you come in instead at like maybe they say noon or one yeah you need to come in at 10 if you want to set up your station on time so really you come in at 10 10 to 1 in the morning or 2 in the morning 10 a.m to 1 a.m so then your window of time at 1 a.m you get home by let's say 2 after you close your station and everything like that, you get home at say 1.30 or 2, we'll say 1.30 for posterity.

1.30 in the morning, you get to bed at like 2. So 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. You have 2 hours to get to the restaurant. Get your knives, sharpen your knives, press your chef coat, go to the bathroom, workout. So I basically had anywhere between a 2-hour window to get anything done for the YouTube channel. And the only way to expand that for editing,

was I was like, I'll just sleep less. It gives me three more hours a day. So they gave me six hours a day to do work. So that's kind of what the process was to get to that point. And yeah. What were the first few videos that you decided to film? It started out kind of wonky. You can go back and see some of my old videos in the apartment that I was at.

And I just like found some shitty lights and turned it on. I think I was trying to give like chef techniques away. I was like, okay, this is how you like set up for cooking and, you know, make your kitchen efficient and you can do this and that. They were really boring and really slow and poorly edited. But my idea in my head was like, well, maybe I can give people the information, the secret stuff that nobody gives away. All these chefs are very secretive. You know, they don't want to talk about the techniques in the restaurant industry. And I was like, well, I don't give them a fuck, you're paying me $9 an hour, I'll say whatever I want. And so that's where I started.

What were some of the secrets you were giving away? Things that people wouldn't normally know, because they're not in cookbooks and you're not going to Google certain nowadays, you kind of can because like more and more people are talking about it, but back in the day you couldn't Google some of these techniques. People didn't even know they existed. Just little things like the finesse and the way that you operate. So for example, if I was to, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to think there's just so many things.

Okay, so like making a cheese foam, right? If you wanted to make a cheese foam, you, it's really, really basic. You need two ingredients and you need a whipped cream canister and that's it. But most people don't realize that. So if I were to show someone this technique where I'm like, yeah, You just take cheese, you grate it, you put it in a blender, you pour a boiling cream over it, you blend it until it's smooth, pour it into that whipped cream canister, and fill it with one nitrogen cartridge, shake it, and you have like an gorgeous, voluminous, fine dining cheese foam,

something that you would see in a restaurant and be like, wow, this is amazing, where I'm giving little techniques like that, that you can't just Google that and find it. That's interesting. And how did you come up with the concept of but better? when you started recreating other menu items and doing it better or cheaper. So a lot of my content comes from me being annoyed. I feel like the Popeye's chicken sandwich. Do I remember that?

Remember when that came out? Yes. And everyone was freaking up. People were really freaking out. People were fighting each other. Yes, the line down the block for Popeye's chicken. I just want to come on record to say that Popeye is where there was a fight. I was living there.

It was five, 10 minutes away. What happened? Wait, the person that passed away? No, oh, no,

no, no, no. It got that bad. I like how we have to clarify what, what story were talking. Which fight? There was more than one.

Gosh, it was, there was like two, two or three fights, but, uh, no, it was like something had happened with like the,

the, the manager, the employees were like quitting or something because of all the chaoticness. And it was actually like a fight between like a manager and a customer. They just started like beating the guy up. So I was, yeah, I was living like five minutes away. And I was like, gosh, put the town on the map over here. Wow.

Thanks, Popeyes. You want to try it more though. Yeah. Because you hear about that. I want to try that. Is it that good? See, that's so interesting to me. It's like, oh my God, somebody died over this.

Time to go try. There was a mini riot because they ran out and people started like going crazy. I thought that was the problem. Pop-I's chicken sandwich. Yeah, I think it was Popeyes. That's insane. Over a chicken sandwich. That's not right.

Riot. I think it was 2017. That was the chicken sandwich craze. Yes. Everyone is doing. Because everybody wants, because KFC was like, wait, somebody's fighting for your chicken. I want someone to fight for my chicken. I don't know.

But that's what annoyed me, though. And then I heard about someone, I heard about someone getting killed over this thing. And I was like, I was like, that's where you got to draw the line. Like, if you're not drawing, drawing the line at fist fights in line you're drawing the line in human life because that is unbelievably ridiculous and so I just was so annoyed and so upset at this and my immediate response was like you know what I have to go try this because if people are losing their minds over it it better be fucking good so I go I drive there I pull up and I was I was doing videos at the time

yeah I pull up I ordered the sandwich unbelievable line it's a an hour. So I'm like exhausted at this point. I get the sandwich and I take one bite and my immediate response was this is probably one of the worst chicken sandwiches I've ever eaten in my fucking life. The fact that I wasted my time here and someone died over this, I can't think of a bigger waste. And so I took that energy and I was like, I could make this way fucking better easily at home with minimal equipment. This isn't this is like basic ass shit. And so I was like, you know what? I'll make a video about it. And I kind of had that energy going into it too. That's sort of like I'm annoyed at this. The fact that this happened. And so I brought that into the video and I was like, we're making this

better. You can do this at home. You. Not just me. You. If you're watching this, I promise you, you can make this. If you follow my instructions, it will be better and you will have more knowledge and power and you're going to have fun. You're not going to wait in line while you watch Jeffrey punched some dude in the face because his chicken sandwich didn't get there on time. And so I did it and that video immediately went pretty crazy. Like day one, there was an article about it. Really? Yeah, because it was at the height of the Popeye's thing.

So it immediately kind of swept up. And there were a ton of comments of people being like, man, Josh, you should make this into a series. Like I just found you, blah, blah, blah, like this would be a lot of fun to watch. And so I was like, okay, then here we are. 70 or 80 episodes later. Wow.

Now, back when you made that video, were you doing YouTube full time? Or was this just a side thing that you were working on still? I think I had just, just become full-time on it. I just, like, nobody was working for me at the time. I had just barely become full-time. What was that process like? How long did it take you to quit your job?

And were you nervous about quitting your job at the time? To do YouTube. Yeah, it was hard. I cried when I quit my job because you have, like, these attachments to these restaurants. It's not about what you get paid. It's about how much you care about what you're doing. Nobody works in a restaurant to make money.

Unless you want to build and, you know, be an owner of a restaurant, that's a different concept. But as a line cook, prep cook, it's pure passion. The number of times I've seen people go in after work and you don't get to clock in to test stuff and work on dish ideas for free is staggering. So I had a big attachment to the restaurant. The process of quitting was like it took me, I think, I was ready to quit for a while. it took me three months to actually pull the trigger and leave because I didn't want to like let my chefs down and like make them think ill of me or I didn't want to lose the relationships I had and I didn't want to get detached from restaurants. That was like a big thing for me and I'm still very close with them. I'm also working on my first. And so it's like one of those things where yeah, it was just it was just a tough process. I was making a, I knew it was time to leave when I was looking at my paycheck and I was looking at the YouTube check and the YouTube check and the YouTube check was probably 100x that. Really?

Yeah. Can you share how big the YouTube paycheck was back then? Yeah. So I'm trying to remember what it was. 100x may not be inaccurate. Maybe more like 50x, but it was like, it was getting paid like around like 30,000 a month. And as a line cook getting paid $11 an hour. Yeah.

That's substantial. I'm surprised you held out for that. I know. Like that's crazy to me. Like I would have seen 30,000 a month. and then 11 an hour and be like, okay, easy decision right there. It was scary because I was so used to like barely being able to pay rent for so long that seeing that kind of money, I was just, I saved every dollar.

I was not fucking with that money at all. So it was, it was tough to kind of like step away, but I will say that I knew I wanted to leave and I knew I could handle it. It was just like I said, the emotional attachment. But imagine like line cooking and maybe you have a bad day. Because this happened several occasions. I have a bad day and I'm like it's just a rough night and I'm cooking and you know maybe maybe maybe one of the chefs is getting on me and by the way all these guys are amazing so I'm not

shitting on them at all but maybe you know it gets it gets heated in a kitchen sometimes and they're like you know maybe shitting I mean they're like god damn Josh like you're really not not on your game tonight like you fucked up two steaks did this you did this and they're like and they're like you know you want that holiday bonus start working and I'm like you have no fucking idea like you've no idea I literally make your salary in two months like you know not not to be a dick but it's like in my mind That's what was the what would the bonus have been like at the time is it like 500 bucks a thousand dollars oh like 150 or 200 bucks maybe wow Yeah now did they know you had the YouTube panel at the time or no they did okay, but they didn't know you how much you're making I had no idea yeah

Yeah and what was your production schedule like at that point? How many how many videos are you posting a week? One to two some weeks were one it was pretty sporadic I didn't really have a very good posting schedule But I was very consistent if I had post it posted one, it was on Wednesdays, if I posted two, it was on Sundays and Wednesdays. Got it. Every single time, no matter what. And you did everything yourself, from filming to planning to, it's fantastic.

Yeah, it was, well, that's why I said I slept five hours every night. Because I literally would, sometimes I didn't sleep at all. I would film something in the morning, and I'd have like three hours before I needed to be at work. So I'd film something in the morning, or if it flip, if I was working in the morning, vice versa, I would film it just before the sun went down, right? I'd run home and get it filmed. Or on a day off, I would film two. videos and then I would edit throughout the work days so like if I had work in the more in at night you

know like night shift then I would wake up at probably 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. go to the gym immediately come back at it for an hour go to work come back at around one in the morning and then I would edit from one in the morning to three in the morning and then go to bed and then wake up at you know four or five sometimes and then how did that schedule change when you went full time That was wild. What was your first day like? Waking up and there's nothing to do but YouTube. Yeah, I mean, I remember my immediate thought was like,

I'm not going to go and like rest. I don't want to start this off with, I didn't want to start developing bad habits. So my immediate response was like, I'm working every single day. I'm working more than how, whatever the energy was that it took to work at a restaurant, I'm just going to do that 2X for this.

So I immediately started working like way more. But I did get more sleep. So that was good. And how was balancing a relationship at the same time as getting like three hours of sleep a night? That was tough. I never, she also was a teacher. Her name was Kate. Yeah.

Yeah, she was working as a teacher. So we never saw each other for a year. For an entire age. We lived together. Yeah. I mean, we like, so she would, she would, I would wake up. She would be asleep. I would come back.

She would be asleep every day. except for the days off. If there was a day off, I would see her and we would spend a lot of time. How long are you been dating her at that time? Two years, I think. Yeah. So the year before that, we saw each other more.

The year before that, yeah. That sounds so great. Yeah, I used to drive. So she lived in San Marcos at the time going to college. So I would drive from Austin, which is about a 30 to 45-minute drive. I would sometimes go to work, immediately get off.

She was in college at, you know, so her hours were pretty flat. so she would stay up. So I would leave the restaurant, maybe midnight, drive 45 minutes, straight from the restaurant, and all my shit with my knives and shit, drive all the way to her in San Marcos,

take a quick shower, and then we'd hang out from, you know, like midnight or 1230 in that case, to like two or three in the morning. I'd spend the night there, and then I'd immediately get up at like six or seven. Well, no, that was a night show. So I would get up closer to like 10.

Get ready, leave, and drive all the way back to Austin with all my knives and stuff. You know what? That's absolutely crazy because I have a very similar, story. When I first was dating my wife, she was going to school in Milwaukee, and I was living in Illinois, which is like an hour and a half, I would wake up, again, 5.30 to get the commute. And I probably wouldn't leave until midnight. I wouldn't get there to one in the morning,

and we would spend time. So I know exactly what you mean. And that's a tough situation to be in. Was she understanding of that, like right from the gecko? Because I know sometimes it's hard for your partner to visualize like okay how long is this going to be or did she know like all right you're going to grind it out for however like were you clear up front about like what your plan was or how did you feel about that not at all i was well first off let me let me rephrase that she was extremely understanding i was not clear at all i never said anything about how long it was going to last what it was going to look like um i just was expressing her how much i liked her and i think that she saw the effort because like I very rarely asked her to come to me it was like I'll go to you you

you're in college like let me come to you I'll do that so I think she saw the effort and kind of like use that as I guess collateral for the emotional attachment right where it's like okay well he's putting in at least this much effort and so I know he cares she's easy to please you know she's laid back out she had to deal with a lot for me starting on because it's like never see me it's always late at night I'm usually like like fucking dead when I saw her. Yeah. Like dead.

I mean, I can muster up, you know, we watch a little fun movie, we laugh. You know, you muster up the energy. But she always got me at 50% for probably five years. Yeah. Did that ever worry you that that would have a toll on the relationship? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it did. But you know what?

I think it actually helped the relationship because it made us work through our issues more quickly because they were exacerbated by the exhaustion. Yeah. But we ended up, I feel like, building a relationship. really good foundation because of it. It started off poorly and then got better and better and better and better rather than worse, whereas most relationships start off great and get worse and worse and worse and worse. What's that like cheesy saying? If you can't tolerate me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best. Don't ever see this. I knew this was going to happen. I knew this was going to

I'm just saying it applies. It makes sense. It does. It does make sense. I agree with that. Yeah, No, I agree with that. I think that that, for better or worse, whatever the saying is, I agree with that. I also think at the end of the day, you have to be able to do your shit. Like if you're going to be in a relationship with somebody, if you have a desire in your life or there's something you want to do, you have to be able to do your shit. And if that person's not going to let you do it, I'm sorry, but no. You need to move on.

You know? And so I felt that way, but she also had zero ego in it. So I was just like, hell yeah, this is great. You think distance is ever a viable reason to break up with someone? Or do you think like if you really love that person that you can make it work? So it wouldn't work anyways, basically, if you would do it. Man, distance is really hard. I've done it before.

I don't like it. I don't think I would want to put up with it. But if it was with my fiance now, I definitely would. But that's the thing, though. It skews your ability to have foresight for the future of that relationship. Like now, obviously in hindsight, I'm like, oh my God, look this amazing relationship we've developed. But that took years. So maybe if it was early on in the first year, how would I have known?

Right? But I would say short another story is it's probably possible, but it's a lot harder. What do you think, Graham? I think everyone has different emotional needs. And if that's not something they're comfortable with, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I think it would make it easier knowing there's an end date. Like, hey, if you could put up with like this one year, like just go through this one year or like a year and a half, however long.

it is then you at least see the end of the tunnel but just having this indefinite date in the future that could be any time i think that would that be difficult i have a hot take here but i think it's hard for somebody to see how compatible they are if you don't live together and i think that's changing with like the current generation where a lot of people are moving in before they get married uh but like i want to know that person's like bad habits so everything before i like make that decision. What was the thing that was most surprising about Kelsey, Alex? She doesn't watch the ice comments.

She doesn't watch it. You're fine. You're good. She's not going to see this. She's definitely not going to see this. This is going to get clipped all over TikTok. Of course. All right.

Give me a second. Just tag Kelsey in this. Yeah. What's her at if you can let everyone know? No, we're definitely letting people. Something like that. Let's see. Oh.

I think the most surprising, this is going to show, you know what, this is a fitting podcast to disclose this, but the most shocking thing was that this girl really can't cook, like anything at all. Like not just because this is, you know, about food, but like when she was living in college, like I would, like, I'm not a cook myself. Like I can cook, but I wouldn't say I'm great. But I can make food. And I would be like, so like, you're saying you can't cook, like, how are you eating? She'd be like well like I go visit my mom like once a month and she makes all these like home-cooked meals and she freezes them all and like then she like unfreezes them as she goes and I'm just like like she did not like it was so bad I'm sorry Kelsey it was so bad she didn't know how to make like scrambled eggs and oh boy and so we had a bad case and I when I did a house tour video I like made a joke about like not her not being able to cook and I think her you know, her mom or whatever might have taken a little bit of fence to that. But I was like, I don't, you know, I was like, no, it's not your fault.

Like a lot of people nowadays, like, you know, they can't cook. But that was the biggest shock. So yeah, so starting the relationship, I had to cook. I had to cook everything, basically. And I, and I cooked everything pretty much up until today. She's still kind of, she's getting better. But yeah, that was the biggest shock for me. Wait, I'm a little lost on what you were talking about.

The biggest shock was that she couldn't cook. Yes. Like, even basic things. Yeah, it was because think about it. If you date somebody and you don't move in with them, you may not know that because, you know, when somebody says they don't know how to cook, you assume like, oh, like, yeah. Funny. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Or like, like, like, no, but like genuinely like my wife did not know how to cook. What's your, what's your, how do you do dinner? Well, I typically cook everything. But now, now she's getting better. So the other day she, what did she cook? uh here's gosh calcy i'm so sorry calcy i'm sorry for exposing you right now like a typical if i'm work i work a lot and so if i'm working like a typical thing like she'll eat is like she likes to take like a bag of like frozen

corn from the freezer and like she won't even heat it up she'll just eat it so that's not huh huh or and i'm like oh hell no you're going no way no no no oh no oh like she'll open up or like she'll open up like a green bean can and she'll just like eat it out of the can no no no so anyway what's her name Kelsey Kelsey you don't have to do this I'm here for you tell her what she can do with some frozen corn yeah yeah give us that frozen corn with that literally anything what do you recommend if someone doesn't know how to cook how can they make themselves a nutritious meal for cheap it's not microwaved what am I God yes okay oh god I mean there's a million things

People start. They got to start somewhere. Maybe you start with scrambled eggs. You know, that's the first concern I had when you said that. Maybe you start there. The internet is the resource, I think, right? And I'm not even doing this to plug my own channel, but it's just kind of like everything's out there. Google your exact issue and find it.

It's there. There's a way to do it. That being said, though, there's two tent poles that a lot of people struggle with with cooking. First one is failure. And that's like number one. People are afraid to make something and fuck it up. They don't want to dedicate their time and money. and fuck it up and it'd be bad.

That makes sense. It's also a larger statement about society, but we'll not by that later. And then the second issue is that they don't think that they're capable. Like they just think that they are in case. It's totally separate from the failure aspect. They just think that they're completely incapable. And then that's for somebody else to do.

That's not for me. I don't like do that. And so those two things kind of have to get taken away and then you just have to Google something and find something. And you'd be surprised because we're the only animal on planet Earth that cooks our food before we eat it. There's no other animal on earth known in existence, as far as I know, that cooks their food before they eat it. It's built in our DNA.

Food is more nutritious and easy to assimilate nutrients when you cook it. So we're supposed to, which means that, yes, even your wife can cook. But I also understand that people don't want to cook. The last thing I will say is I don't think anyone needs to cook. If someone's like, I don't want to cook, cool. I don't have any quarrel or judgment on that whatsoever. See, I'm worried about the time commitment of cooking because I see this is like, I'm going to I'm going to be scarfing down five minutes. How many hours does it cost me to cook? What's the

opportunity cost of microwaving that meal? I could be making a video instead. I could be investing instead. I could be doing so many other things. Let me go my net worth really quick. Hang on one second. Divide that. Yeah, divide that, carry the four. Hmm. Yeah. That'd be like going to Nobu 30 times. But, you know, I get that. That makes sense. But I see like I'm spending an hour cooking something and then five minutes eating it. Like the ratio is not there. Like an hour for five minutes. Also,

Macy cooks everything for you. No. No, let me give you an example of, uh, she cooks. No, no, I have an example right here of, uh, one of Graham's meals. And he actually made a video about it, which, uh, you guys can see. So Josh, I want you to review this video or this meal. And I want you to tell me what Graham could have done better. Oh my gosh.

And this is an old video. If you guys want to look it up, it's called how to make 97 cent breakfast. My morning routine. So what he does is he takes eggs and he puts him in a pan and then he Is there any oil or butter in the pan before? A little oil. Okay. A little like olive oil. Okay.

I just don't want it to stick. You adding any seasoning to the eggs, or nothing? Salt? Just nothing. What? No. Why?

I don't like it. No. No. Graham? Really. I know we just met. There's no way you do not like salt pepper. Yeah.

I like the most plain stuff. There's no. Can you, do you have anything to say about this? I need somebody. I need some. I'm just a. surprises you are, I thought you probably would have salted it. You've never heard him.

You've never seen me use salt and pepper. I'm just saying I would have thought that you would. Yeah, but you go out to restaurants. Yeah, you go out to restaurants and you like the food. So my guess is you think you don't like salt and pepper because it takes more time to go grab it and put it in your food. But if you like food from restaurants, like they season their food properly. So as a judge here, you like salt and pepper.

And I never had an issue with it. It's not like having an issue. It's like, okay, this would make it taste. Okay, hold on here real quick. I'll finish this off real quick, just so we could get a full review and finish off. So he takes the eggs. He puts it in the pan, no seasoning whatsoever. Then he's basically making like an omelet, and he's putting a pre-shredded sharp cheddar cheese from Kroger on there

and some pre-slice turkey breast from Kroger also. And then toasting a bagel and adding cream cheese onto the bagel. So what would you say to that meal? we make it better. We need to make, yeah, 97 cents. Under a dollar for that meal. Well, maybe not with inflation now. Yeah, with inflation.

Yeah, it's like $40 now, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, yeah. I mean, the meal itself, in essence, there's nothing wrong with. I mean, I understand why you use that for the price point, so that makes sense. It could still be good.

Maybe, like, I don't know, I would like ham better because turkey tastes weird when it gets heated for some reason, unless it's in a sandwich. I think you just put salt and pepper. That's the one thing. That's it. That's it. A little bit of MSG maybe.

If there's anything, I mean, maybe not an omelet, but in some things, yes. If there's one thing that I think people make the biggest mistake, and the first thing I judge a restaurant on within the, it takes me a fraction of a second to tell whether a restaurant's on their shit. And it is salt. It is salt levels. Most places, I would see salt is single-handedly one of the most powerful, influential elements to making great food. because most places just don't know how to put enough. But I also think that, like, you know, in your case,

some people are either sensitive to it or it's not something that they really think about and it doesn't really affect their experience. But I would say most people, though, their experience is severely affected with lack of salt. But too much could completely ruin the meal. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, too much of anything, right?

Like, you know, it's sort of like you want to balance the amount of salt in it. You want to, basically, you want to push salt as far as it can physically go before reaching that salty level. If you ever go to a restaurant and you're like, man, this is my favorite restaurant. Everything they make is so, so, so, so, so good. Those places oftentimes are seasoning their food to the absolute max. Just before that line, one of the chefs I used to work for, he would test his sauces. He would make the sauce season it.

And it would take him like 15 minutes to season a sauce. He would like season it, stir taste, season stir taste, like over and over and over. And the way he would take to make sure it had enough salt is he would take about a teaspoon and then put a really tiny sprinkle of salt on it. right and if that tiny sprinkle of salt took it overboard it was there hmm that's really interesting that is yeah I imagine you have a really good blood pressure me because of your lack of salt consumption it's low I have low blood pressure oh yeah yeah so more salt then right think so is that the move I don't know I am not a medical

professional yeah I'm not take any of my advice yeah no mine is consistently at the point where if it were any lower it would be a concern what is I've never heard of low blood neither have I This guy's never stressed out. I'm constantly stressed out. But my blood pressure doesn't go up. Even when I did the boxing thing, they did the blood pressure and it was like slightly too low. And they're like, we need you to do jumping jacks.

And I'm like, I am nervous on the inside. I'm like, okay. And I got it up. But consistently it's just been low. So you've been having some problems getting it up. Yeah. I'll tell you one thing. My blood pressure is always high whenever I'm on his Twitter.

Every time I see his Twitter, he's like the housing market. is crashing. I'm like, cool, that's awesome. I'm really glad that I bought two fucking houses. It's great. At the height of the market. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So tell us about you bought, you bought two houses? Yes. So, um, one in Austin and one in L.A. Two studios, basically, because we go to L.A. so frequently. Um, and so my mentality, we are actually building a studio separately in Austin now.

But the reason why we did the place in L.A., which you know, is, you know, maybe we'll rent it out every once in a while to pay the mortgage, whatever. I'm not really, I'm flexible on it, but we go there so often and it is so expensive to bring my team, rent out of space, shoot in it. And I like LA. I'm from LA. So, you know, I want to spend a lot of time there. That was actually, I did the math and I was like, well, if I can find a house for this price and I build a kitchen in it, it would be less expensive. And I could rent it out to tenants and pay it when I'm not there and rent it out on Airbnb and, you know, pay for the mortgage when I'm not there.

And then when I'm there, just, you know, don't block those dates out. So we did that. And I got a place in LA and we're not there very often, but in the sense of like our total shoots, but we're there often enough that it's utilized to the potential that I wanted it for. Yeah. What's your team look like now? So we've got 11 dedicated people.

No. And then we have a bunch of like freelancers that we use, you know, thumbnail editors. Have you guys seen this, by the way? Have you seen this like huge weight? I'll talk about it later. No, let's talk about it now. I'm curious now. This huge wave of like thumbnail artists.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like going crazy because of Mr. Bees. Obviously, king, legend. Makes sense. I get it. But we started working with some of them and they're cool. So we use some thumbnail artists.

And then my 11 dedicated people. So we have my director and who I now call my vice president. He's been with me since almost like day one. Like when I was making enough money to hire somebody, he was my first hire. His name is Vickram. He's incredible. he's extremely good. Work ethic, top tier.

What does he do? So he does now pretty much everything with me. So like we ideate content together. He does editing still. I really need to get him off editing because it's just taking too much of his time. But, you know, like when you care about what you do,

he has like a iron grip on some of the creative. And so he still wants to edit it despite us having several editors. But so he does directing on set. We'll work on building out run of shows for shoots. he will like I said we come with creative ideas I bounce ideas off him sometimes we'll work on like new revenue sources together

he'll handle like brand deal stuff like creative like submitting creative stuff between brands and sponsorship so that we can like make that system efficient yeah and then everything in between that you would imagine the only thing he doesn't handle is like obviously like financials like I still do that but um but yeah he also functions like a managing factor in the team and then we have uh we have my lead

editor Maya she's great incredibly talented again work ethic top tier so she does basically oversees all edits and helps make sure that the editing schedule is like consistent every single time she and she rules it with iron fish she's like when's this coming when's that coming you know she's great and then we have you know our other editors a few staff editors we have some people who are part time editing and part time on set shooting so we'll have like you know one guy his name's kendrick he is on camera when we're shooting, but he's also editing when he's not on set. Then I have my executive assistant

who basically handles like scheduling for myself and then other people in the team. And then we have our content coordinator who makes thumbnails. He works on content SEO with me and all sorts of other things. Website. We built up this really cool website

that is super messed up with the recipes. I got to figure that out. But yeah, and that's pretty much, I mean, there's other people obviously, but it's like editors, coordinators, assistant, director, and some writers. That's a huge team.

I don't, I don't know why I thought it was just like you and maybe two people. That's how it feels. Yeah, I mean, you know, we could go lighter. Oh, there's two other people I completely forgot about. Culinary as well. So I have a culinary producer, I call them culinary producer and then a culinary assistant.

So they both like measure ingredients out. If stuff needs to be pre-prepep, they pre-preprep at the day before. I'll send them them. the recipe. That's a great idea. Yeah. So I'll send them the recipe and all this stuff and I'm like, hey, you know, be sure to get these ingredients and this is exactly how we need to prep this out. Make this sauce, make this soup, oil this down, do this, this, this, bring it all the way up to where it needs to be so that when we get on set, it's a three-hour shoot, not an eight-hour shoot.

And they do all that, that stuff and help with cleaning up. Yeah, like I've seen it with some of the cooking channels where they put something in an oven and then there's an oven next to it. They're like, and then they just immediately take it out cooked. Yeah. I mean, that's how you do it. Otherwise, it takes so long. If you're doing it. everything in French terms to be almanute, which means like everything to order everything right away. Oh, cook the chicken. Here's the chicken. It's done. It's way better if it's pre-made. So we'll have like sauces that take six hours to boil down, right? So we're going to do all that the day before. Put it in a quart container to leave it in the fridge so that when we start the shoot, we're boiling

the sauce down and then, you know, it's boiling on camera. We get the shot. Okay, cool. I go put it off to the side and then I pull out the one that's already done. I'm like, looks like this. Wow. So but we do that with with those people. So they'll be pre-prepping that for me. And I'll go check on and make sure that it's right and all that. What's your schedule look like day to day? Chaos. Yeah. Yeah.

It sounds like it's really organized right now. It's very chaotic, but I like working a lot. Even if we had enough employees for me to have more time for myself, I would not do that. You know, it's just, I like the process. I'm sure you guys as well. You know, we all work a lot here. It's doing the stuff that's fun. So my schedule is usually I get up at four or four or four.

five every day, no matter what, weekend, holiday, doesn't matter. I do not get up later than that unless a special occasion. Like I got up, I stayed up way too late the night before or something else, right? Maybe a vacation, which I have taken one vacation in the last 10 years. So I get up at four or five in the morning, go to the gym, come back. Once I get back, I immediately am like on emails or I'm working on writing recipes. I'm writing stuff for my next book. I'm writing stuff for some other concepts that I'm working on, restaurant-related stuff that I'm working on. And then by about nine, this is non-filming days. By about nine, it's like back-to-back calls from nine to five p.m.

And then I'll try to like squeeze stuff in between that, like write a recipe in between calls. And then I'll test recipes at night if I can. I would say I test maybe 10% of our recipes before we shoot them. So I just like write the recipe and it usually works. And that's that. And then shooting days, same thing, but there's a shoot in the middle of the day that. lasts about six hours. So you take calls for like eight hours.

Sometimes, yeah. What do you have to talk about that? That's so. I was kind of thinking the same thing. Like, what's there to say? You know,

I just want to say this. I don't remember, I don't want, I hate to mix the two, but it was either Alex Hormosey. I don't know if you're familiar with him or Elon Musk. Maybe,

I think it was Elon Musk. One of the two said like, oh, the meetings. It's like 95% of meetings. Just aren't needed. And also if a meeting. has more than like three people in it like everyone that isn't talking or like listening or

whatever or directly related to that meeting is just wasting there it was Elon it's just wasted yeah it was Elon and it's really made me reevaluate like obviously like calls are important but a lot of the times like a call can be solved just with like a simple text or like a group call could just be like a group text like it's just a lot more efficient you know well it's funny you say that we're actually working on grinding that down a a little bit for that exact reason because there are some calls that are inefficient that we have regularly because I like to be I'm a communicative guy so I like to communicate with everyone as much as possible but I agree with that and there are calls we're taking off that being said though

it's mostly because we condense a lot of my calls throughout the week on like just a couple of days because all my other days I'm too busy to take calls like you know filming and stuff yeah filming or recipe developing or just we're working on a lot of projects at once so you know we're building the studio in Austin so like there might I need to get on the phone call with on a phone with my contractor, right? I need to get on the phone with the guy that we're leasing the building with. I need to get on a, you know, so like little things like that. We're just, I think it's a combination of working on so many projects and some calls being inefficient that we're working on grinding those down. And then the third thing is we squish it all onto like just

Monday and Tuesday. And then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I almost never have calls. Interesting. How's your business broken down now in terms of the income? Is it, is it ad revenues, sponsorships, your own products? So it's broken down into a couple of different sectors. Obviously we have ad revenue from YouTube and then we have like, you know, all the other things like Snapchat and all the other social media sites that produce income. And then there's my cookbook, my second cookbook, my merchandising, and then we are working on some other stuff. I really like to take my time with the product space. Yeah. You know, I really don't like the idea of being like, well, I can make, I can make a million dollars right now. I

just come up with this project and white label it and call it today. Like quality is so important to me. I want people to buy something they love. So we're working on that. Product space, obviously brand sponsorships. And then sometimes I'll do like a little bit of like consulting work. But that's pretty infrequent. So I wouldn't even really calculate that in.

And I'm probably forgetting some other things, but that's some of it. Can you break it down like a pie? Like for example, this is this certain? Yes. Yes. So there's. AdRev is probably anywhere from 30 to 50%. Book is anywhere from 20 to 30%.

Probably closer to 45% for ad rev. And then everything else kind of breaks down pretty evenly, I would say, yeah. Have you ever thought about doing the Mr. Beast approach of doing like the Mr. Beast burger, but you could come up with your own concept and have a ghost kitchen do it for you? So I've looked into ghost kitchens a bunch.

I knew about ghost kitchens before Mr. Beast, probably ever even thought about it because I was working in, I knew about ghost kitchens when they were just beginning to like become a thing. Who knows? Maybe Mr. Beast knew. I'm not like trying to say anything, but it is so hard to maintain good consistency of product in a ghost kitchen. So I would like to do one to get food to more people. That being said, from a professional professional's perspective working in food, I'd rather have a brick and mortar. And I'd rather put my energy towards that for now and do a ghost kitchen later. We were approached by the same company

that approached Mr. Beast at the same time he got approached and they were like, we can open 100 locations for you in the next six months. And I was like, wow, that sounds fucking horrible. That's not good because if you do that, there's going to be crazy inconsistency. You're going to have so much, so many fucked up orders. And guess what?

Mr. Beast had a lot of fucked up orders and they had to go back and fix a lot of things. I remember talking to read about it and I was like, man, I'm so sorry. sorry, like, if I can help you guys, please let me know. They managed, they did an incorrect. I felt so bad, because I was looking on Twitter. And I think the first night that they came out with it, I placed an order.

And I was looking at Twitter because I was so curious. I wanted to make a whole video on this. Yeah. But every, it's already saturated. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I've seen some of the inconsistencies on that and just how they've had to deal with that. Thankfully, it seems like everyone was super understanding. It's like, hey, you can't just do this and have every order perfect.

Like, it's going to happen. So it seems like, and they made it right. quickly they're like if anything is wrong we'll send you another one we'll give you it free we'll give you a you know gift card on top of that like that i have to say when when it first came out i placed an order for me and a bunch of friends and uh it was like probably $80 worth of food or something and i got half of it could not figure out a way to submit a claim to get a refund like it and and there was problems with this because like mr bese had put out a thing like if this happened to you like tweet out at me and i was like yeah i was about to say you just tweet out i was

I was like, I'm not going to tweet at him. So Mr. Bees, if you're watching this, like, I'm going to put my Venmo right here. And if you want to send me 40 bucks. Get over it, Alex. Come on. Listen, I'm a hardworking man. You know, $40. I will say this.

I will say this. They did an extremely good job. I have so much respect for them in the way that they handled that. I agree. They did so good. I love them both. And Reed, I don't know where Reed came into play there, but Reed, like, was very on top of it with him.

So I was surprised to see how much. much they cared about the product, which you don't see very often. So they did a really good job turning that around. But just to refocus back onto if I did that. Yeah. That is, imagine, like, my whole brand is centered around my food being good. How the fuck would that go if I did that happen to me? Oh, wow.

That would have fucking destroy me. For Jimmy, he's not known as the, oh, now he almost is with feastables. But back then. That took time to build. He's not, not as the food gas. But he's figured it out. Like, the thing is, like, he, from a quality, he cares of, about quality. I know he does, but they figured out, they figured out how to fix the pipeline.

So they're good. But like, I would have been a guinea pig in that scenario. And like, I care so much about the experience of the person eating my food. I could never risk that. Couldn't, not even one meal. I mean, I used to work in restaurants where every single plate counted. Every single plate. So imagine like, I'm just like, okay, let me open a hundred places. Like, let's see what happens. Like, God bless, hope this works out, you know. And yeah, I would, that would have been, I would have been in like shambles if that happened to me. But you built a substantial business off the cookbook yeah that is those seem like crazy numbers yeah we didn't expect it to do as well as it did which i was surprised about um i not to say that i didn't think it would

do well i'll give you an example of why i so i told you i released a cookbook when i was 17 right it didn't sell i think it sold like 10 000 copies which is like pretty cool for a kid right but um i i went to you know the san francisco fairy building do you know it you never been How is that possible? How is it possible? You guys have never heard of this? I don't know. You guys have never heard of the San Francisco.

Have you heard of the San Francisco? Never. Nope. Have you been to San Francisco? Yeah, I have. I like, whoever is listening to this,

I know that there are people listening to this podcast that is like, wow, this just changed their opinion about you guys. They're just like unsubscribe. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and they have the fisherman stuff. Fisherman's Wharf?

Yeah, yeah, they're warfing it up over there. Right. So short, short of the story, it's a really big, beautiful building. In San Francisco, It has a bookstore in it that's really famous and a bunch of other like little shops to serve food. It's very big.

It's like you saw it. It's a very grandiose, like long, long building. And so I went there when I was a kid with my book to do a book tour at the time. This was when I was like 17 years old. And one person showed up to the book tour. And which was awesome. It still feels good.

But it was also kind of bummed out where I was just like, I don't know why I expected more people when I, again, I was 17. So you know those kinds of, the things get to you. And it stuck with me. Like, it stuck with me. Fast forward to me launching this book. You know, I was 25 when it came out. So I launched this book. And when I got to the fairy building, I was filled with fear because I was like, I was like, what if that all happens again? Like, I don't know if I can handle that I can handle that I put into this book. Like, I put a lot into this book.

I don't know if I can handle walking up to this and only seeing like two or three people or even like 50 people. Like I, not to say that I needed a lot of people there to make me feel good, but I was just like, it was like a defining moment. of like, this is how it's gonna go. And I didn't see anyone in the bookstore. And I was like, fuck. Like, there's nobody here. There's no way.

And one of the ladies came out, who was there when I came there the first time? She was like, it's nice to see you again. And I was like, oh, yeah. And she's like, they're outside. And I walked outside and there were 2,000 people wrapped around the building. No, 3,000 people wrapped around the building.

And I'd never seen a line like that before. Like literally the line went down the entire length of this football-sized building all the way around it. And I was like, holy shit. That's what I realized, I think the book's doing good. And every time we did a book event, it was literally like 3,000 people showed up every single time. We did a book event in Chinatown in L.A.,

and we released a special burger. And I was like, we'll do a book signing, come get a burger, it'll be fun. And the line was all wrapped around Chinatown. And I was like, oh, so people are like in the book. That's great. Wow. And, you know, then the news had come out. I remember when I was waiting to find out

if we hit New York Times Bestseller. And I was sitting at the computer waiting for the email, like refreshing. They're like, oh, we find out today. And I'm refreshing. And I'm like, you know what? Like I had two positions in my mind. I was like, if we don't get New York Times bestseller,

that's totally cool. But the other side, I was like, I have something in mind that I want to go and get if we hit New York Times bestseller, just any position. Just give me just one position. And then I got a phone call for my publisher and the publisher,

and they said that we got number one. New York Times bestseller in all genres. Oh my gosh. And I was like for all genres like outside of cookbooks and they're like all genres. So we outsold every single book. How did you do that? For what time period? For I think it was almost it was we were one of the like top selling books of the year.

I think in all genres. How did you do that? Was that just the YouTube channel? It was a, you know, I'd love to say that there was a, I mean there was a strategy. I mean, why would I launch a book with no strategy? But, I mean, it wasn't an exorbitant, you know, chock full of do this then and this and then. I mean, we promoted it on the channel and we did some fun skits. And that was kind of it.

You know, we promoted it a lot on the YouTube channel. And I did like one TikTok on it. I tweeted it out a few times. I had it in a lot of videos like where it was in the background. So some product placement stuff. But I mean, I just spoke very honestly about it. And I was like, look, you know, this is a book that I want to release for a long time, blah, blah, blah. And it was just cool to do it.

It was just cool to see people show up. I think people were excited to see that it was like a professional's book instead of all these other, you know, personalities, so to speak. A lot of people in food, there's a lot of personalities in food that have not put in, like, the extraordinary amount of work that I put in to a craft. And so I think it was really cool to see that people kind of return the favor a little bit,

where they were like, it felt like, the age-old concept of like, oh, is this real? Like, do people even care about this anymore? it was a really nice reassuring moment to see that they do. Wow. What's the process of writing a book? How do you do that? It's,

aren't you working on one gram? No. Yeah, you're not about that, huh? No. I'd much rather make a video. Yeah.

For me, I don't read that many books. I'll listen to like audio books, but. I don't read a ton of books either. I've not sat down there and read a book. And so I feel like why would I do something that, you know,

I'm not going to sit down and read a book. At some point, yes. Once I put out my third book, it will be officially, I will have written more books than I've read all the way through. Nice. There you go. Yeah. It's not like I don't read for the record. I just don't read books all the way through.

So the process is pretty lengthy. They give you like a deadline, and it's sort of like a race to get to that point. For a cookbook, it's normally broken down in like, okay, how many recipes are they going to be? How many pages? That book has over 100 recipes and like 200. and something pages. And then you define what recipes are going to be there. You write them and everything.

And then you figure out what the book is going to. Prior to doing that, obviously, figure out what the book is going to be about. What's the concept? And then you build everything out from there. So it starts at the top of the tree and then you build the rest of the tree out. It's not that bad if you really know what you're doing and you know what you're writing about, in my opinion. If you're struggling to write a book, probably you shouldn't be writing that book.

It should be easy. I'm sure if you, if, I don't know, if someone came you and offered you enough money and they were like, hey, do this book. You know, maybe you do it. And they, you know, they asked you to talk about something that you know the most about. You probably have a pretty easy time writing about it. It takes a long time and it's a bit of a grind, but, you know, you know, it's all up here. It's tough for me because I feel like, well, I just make a YouTube video. Yeah. Like it would probably be with real estate investing of some sort, but I made so many videos on that. That's fair. And I feel like then the video

just gets pushed out. The algorithm helps and people could watch it, they could pause it, come back to it, they could listen to it in the car. I've thought about, I would say it's two things. Think about it like you have this podcast, you have what you're doing on YouTube, and you have what you do on Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. And what's smart about that is you're making content for people who want to consume it differently. And text is still a piece of content that people want to consume differently. And there's only a few categories that perform really well in literature,

and that is food and financial self-help and maybe a couple of, you know, fiction books that somehow blow up. Like Harry Potter is a great book, great series, you know, that blew because of what it is. That would be like another format for you to put out. And like if they gave you a better royalty, you know, a lot of people say books don't pay. I didn't think that was the case until this. Granted, like it didn't, it wasn't a great split for the first book, but got better after that. Oh, there's a publisher-author split.

Yeah. So like they basically do all of the work like logistically and you just have to. right. Well, I mean, I did more than right. I was, I also was the creative and art director for the book. I was, we hired a photographer, but I basically chose all the direction of the visuals for the photography. I did all the food styling. I did all the, well, I, I, um, brought on some people to help me cook the food because it was like, we filmed in, in six days, we took all the photos for the book. Wow. 100, over 100 recipes. We cooked in six days and photographed. So you do all of the content inside the book and then the publisher does everything aside from that.

Yeah. And they, do they pitch you on the idea or do you pitch them on the idea? I'll never let somebody pitch me on an idea and let it better be really good. I've never, I don't like that kind of stuff. But a publisher would approach you and say, hey, we want to publish a book for you. Do you have any ideas? Yep. You pitch them on that.

Yep. And then they either agree or decline to it and then yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it depends on where you're at with them, right? Like I think I have a really good relationship with my publisher. So I could go to them and be like, I want to do this book and they'd probably just be like, okay, cool. And we would go and do it.

Sure. But after that, Yeah, it's pretty much, like you said, you make all the content. They will put it all on a book and make it look nice, and they have editors that edit it for you, and they know how to do all the traditional things that would be done for the book. Distribution, printing has to be thought of

because that should get expensive. But like, when I was looking at sales and everything, I did the math and, you know, assuming that splits are good, but if I had self-published the book, I probably would have made about, granted, I would have to pay people, you know, so it would be a little bit less than this after paying, you know, an editor,

and for distribution and everything, but the gross would be probably about $15 million on one book. That's insane. In the first year. Now, in fairness, though, do you think you would have done that? Even hiring out with that book versus the publisher who already has those resources and that knowledge, like, is that something proprietary to them that, like, I feel like even if you hired it out, it wouldn't, it might not be the same quality

that they're able to do right off the bat. If you don't know what you're doing, it could go horribly wrong. And I don't think we would have been able to do it because distribution at the time, this was at the height of all of the shortages of this, and we don't have these materials, and we don't have these materials.

And you know what I'm talking about, like, height of back end of COVID, but there was like nothing left. They managed to distribute and print this book while nobody else could print their books. Like everyone was struggling printing books, and my publisher is, the reason why we were able to put out so many books. I don't know. Imagine if we couldn't print

books and we're getting all these orders. That would be horrible. I mean, and so honestly, I got to hand it to them. Like, they were, because of they're so big, they were like reaching to we were printing the book in Canada, in the U.S., in overseas and like printing it in multiple parts of the world and like distributing them all over the place in order. They had to coordinate all that. I mean, I don't know that I would have been able to do that on my own. How much do you think of that was just really good timing? Because issuing that book around COVID, when everyone is at home, I feel like cooking would take a lot more priority

for a lot of people because they're home, they have the time. Partially maybe, it may have been, this is actually more so on the tail end when people were already going back out, eating and things were getting a little more normalized. Definitely not 100%,

but families were getting together again, and it was much better than the height of COVID. Personally, I think it was good timing because more people were cooking at the time, because people started cooking in COVID, and then for some people it stuck. But other than that, maybe a little bit of good timing.

I honestly am a big believer in brand and being honest and being good with your intentions. And I really am. Like I care so much about what we do. And I think I've made that evident to my, you know, me being real in the sense of my craft that people just saw it and they bought

because they know that I care. And that's why I think it happened personally. Just because I feel like I've built a really good relationship where I'm like, look, this is what it is. Like, I don't fuck around with this stuff. Yeah. Do you want to open a restaurant?

Yeah. Multiple. Where? Everywhere. But it's a process. It's easier said than done. Some of these restaurants are really expensive to build. You can't just like, you know, nowadays to build a restaurant, you want to build a nice

restaurant. And I'm not saying it has to be overly gaudy, but, you know, the restaurant I want to build, easily four or five million dollars. That much? Starting cost. Yep. Wow. And does that, obviously that would include rent for a building?

It would not include rent. Rent would be anywhere, but, I mean, rent can be really high. So are we just talking about the buildout alone for all the equipment, $4 to $5 million, plus you're probably looking another, I don't know, a million and a half a year and just overhead, I'm guessing? Yep. Rent can range anywhere from $20,000 a month to $75,000 a month in Austin, depending where you are.

There's a buddy of mine works with a huge restaurant group, and they have a restaurant in Austin that's on South Congress, or no, I'm sorry, not South Congress, South Lamar. And their rent is $85,000 a month. And it's not a huge building. To me, that's exorbitant. That's like way too much.

Oh, go for it. I was going to say, it's not worth that much of my opinion. What type of food would you make in the restaurant? Depends on which restaurant I want to open. I have multiple concepts, sort of already built out with menus and everything. But I think that I want to do, like a finer dining concept, like a high, high, high, high fine dining.

And then I think I have another concept that I can't really say, but it's sort of a midway point and very much like my style of cooking, like me incarnate. And something I think people would really, really like. And that's the one that I'm probably going to lead with first. And then just kind of build out from there. I like the concept of Beasburger. I think Beasburger is really cool.

I think people love hamburgers. So maybe there's like a fast food concept as well. Smash burger. Yeah, I mean, like smash burgers are fun, but it's also an oversaturated market. There's so many burger places now. Everyone's doing a burger place. I love the dough bricks concept. That's cool.

But I, you know, I'll tell you right now that once my restaurant drops, good luck to everybody else that's starting their restaurant. Really? Yeah. You know what would have been a, maybe a saucy video is dough bricks, but better. Yeah. Anytime someone drops a concept, my first thought is like, let's do a collab. and we'll make it but better, but then we put that on your menu.

It would do really well. Oh, yeah. That would be awesome. And then do like, do that in waves. Yeah, it's, yeah,

it's a whole thing. And you would do that with dough bricks? Totally. If anyone here's watching, that has a connection. Yeah. That would be a great idea. Yeah.

I think it would do really well. I think it would do really well. And it would be a lot of fun for people too because, you know, you have your core menu and people know what they're going to get pepperoni,

this and this and that, but this gives you an opportunity to try something new on your menu in two ways. A, stress test it. Do people like it or not? They'll probably like it. And B, you're providing diversity to your customer base. So they're going to come back and order again and again and again, but they know every once in a while they'll get something special. So, and then maybe down the line,

you're like, this sold so well, I'm going to put this on the menu. And then maybe it becomes your new number one core menu item, which would be great. Yeah. And for a restaurant, how often are you supposed to change out the menu or offer newer items? Many restaurants don't change them like very often at all. Sometimes never. It depends on how much, how far behind you are. You know, if the restaurant's really old school and you haven't updated your menu in like 50 years, you got to look at it two ways. Either you need to stay that way and be, be Mr. Authentic traditional or you need to, honestly, I've changed your menu like 20 years ago. Change it to to match the pace of the style. So maybe every 10, 15 years, but it's not like a total overhaul. It's like little things here

and there. You know what I would love to see you do. I would love to see like a more realistic version of like i forgot the name of the show but it's like that i think gordon ramsie was on it where they flip like a failing uh restaurant and they'd like change the menu and they do all the stuff but maybe it's more like just the menu part because i think you're really good with food and me i'm sure there's businesses out there they're struggling with the direction of their menu but i think for like a foodie audience that would be really cool and it would bring people to the to the restaurant i agree yeah yeah i think i think that would be fun to do There's so many concepts that we could do.

It's just my concern with that is legal. There's a lot of legal stuff with that. If something gets messed up and then their restaurant dive bombs, not good. I got a quick question. Do you have to have like elevated taste buds to be a good chef? Because isn't it true that like some people are just born with the ability to notice certain flavors that other people wouldn't notice or they're more sensitive to certain things? I think it's possible.

But I don't know that I necessarily have. I mean, I guess I do, but it's hard. I mean, I started when I was five. So it's sort of like, it's trained, you know. I've spent so much time. I can eat things that aren't that good. And in my, there's two, my brain is in two pieces when I'm eating it.

And let's say it's bad. One part of my brain is like, it's food, whatever. I'm just gonna eat this. And the other part of my brain is like, this is fucking shit. Whoever the fuck cook, this isn't know what the fuck they're doing.

I hate every second of this, you know, but it's like the professional and then the human being, kind of like clashing a little bit. So, I don't know. I mean, I do think you can train your palate. I think anyone can train their palate.

And I think you can be born with maybe a higher sensitivity to certain flavors. Like that's why certain people don't like things like fish or cheese or, you know what I mean? So I can see that. I got more questions, random ones. Okay, what do you think about in and out from a foodie perspective? Oh, top tier. Really?

Love in and out. One of my favorite burger places. And I can tell you why. So let me just address the elephant in the room. Their fries are ass. Okay. But you can order them well done and they're a little better.

I don't go for the fries. I go for the burger. First off, the price is completely unbeatable. I agree. Unbelievably unbeatable. Have they raised their prices with inflation or no? I don't know. It's still like $2.75.

Just a touch. Not much though. I mean, they figured it out food cost. You know, they figured that out big time. But it's more so the whole experience. You go to any other burger restaurant. It genuinely feels like they sat on the fucking burger before you ate it.

I mean, every time, it is so far away from what you really initially desired, that it's just like, why the fuck did you even go here? But you go to, I'm sorry, guys, I have a foul mouth. That's fine. If it's not evident. I just realize I'm the only one cussing in here. I don't know if that's like a no-no. I were, I worked in restaurant.

We want the guests to be themselves. I worked in restaurant industry, my entire professional life. It's like totally screwed my vocabulary in that sense. That being said. So anyway, the burger. When you get a burger, it's just like beautiful. Every time the presentation, it's like perfectly wrapped. The lettuce is poking out.

I mean, stylistically, when I look at that, I eat with my eyes before I eat. So I see that and I'm like, that's great. I appreciate that. I feel good about eating this. They put effort in this. And then the flavor is so consistent. I mean, it's just always good. But I don't know.

Maybe it's nostalgia. So I'm going to raise a point of contention here. I actually, I think in and out, sure, yes, it's the best fast food burger. Yes, 100%, especially value considered. But I do think that there can be some variance and inconsistency with not only the flavor, but also the texture. Sometimes I go and the buns are harder than other times. But I eat a ton of in and out. So I have like a lot.

Oh, this guy has like data. I don't even have. Yeah. It's got a spreadsheet. So it's really good, but sometimes. Exactly. No, you'd be surprised. Firmness.

There are times where you go and you're just a little underwhelmed. You thought you knew what to expect and he's tracking like an inflation chart, but it's, but it's based off of in and out burgers. That's exactly it. Yeah. That'd be a fun tweet. Yeah. Well, you know, still is great.

Any restaurant has inconsistency unless it's like a three Michelin if they want to maintain their stars. But like most restaurants have inconsistency. It's just a matter of how much that, how often that's happening. I've actually never ran into it. I will say half the time I've eaten in and out, it might not have been sober. Yeah. Fair.

Sure. at 2 a.m. Yeah. So another question. When someone says, I want to thank the chef, you know, do they ever pull you out of the kitchen? Did that ever happen to you where they had to thank you? Most of the time in the restaurants that I've worked at, the people are kind of afraid of you, low-key. They're like afraid of disrespecting you, which is a really weird power complex that happens in restaurants.

And I know if there are any line cooks or chefs watching this, they absolutely know what I'm talking about. where there's a certain, you ever go into a nice restaurant? You're kind of like, okay, let me not act stupid. Just to work at one. So do you know what I'm talking about then? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I was a, it wasn't like a nice, nice restaurant. It was a good steakhouse. Yeah. And there's, but there's like a certain respect people have. So a lot of the time, they would thank us through the waiter or waitress. They would tell their waiter or waitress, oh my God, this was really good. Can you please tell whoever made this? And so, and you always like throw a little party whenever that happened.

It was a, it was the best feeling ever. So like, remember I'd be cooking and make, you know, maybe it's really crazy. And then they'd go like, Hey Josh, that A5 steak, they said they wanted to kiss you. And then the whole kitchen, like the whole kitchen is just like, yeah. Everyone's like screaming. Oh, really? It's like this huge, that's one of the beauties of working in a restaurant.

That's why you get so attached. It's like brotherhood camaraderie. And everyone's like, yeah, yeah. Like Josh is on fire tonight or like whoever's doing it. And then they're like, sometimes like the other stations would like make food for you and send it out and send it to your station instead of a table. and you'd like, you know, get it like a plate as like a reward or something. So, yeah. That's really cool.

Yeah. It's a reminder to thank the chef more. Yeah. Never really do that. Have you ever done that? The way that it, the way that it uplifts the kitchen is unreal. Really?

If the kitchen is in a bad spot or even if the kitchen's in a good spot, it doesn't matter. If somebody says, if somebody takes the time to go to the kitchen tells, you know, so-and-so, hey, this was really good. If it's a healthy kitchen, by healthy, I mean, like good attitudes and not toxic, everyone's going to get so hype.

Right. How often is it, though, that someone complains or sends something back? And you know it's like, this is BS. It's perfect. I hate to say it, I haven't worked a lot of restaurants. That's happened a ton, but it does happen. Most of the time, it's pretty low-key. Nothing really happens.

Every once in a while, it's really bad. And they're like, you know, they want something redone. But normally, like, honestly, if they send something back, we, the restaurants I've worked for, we're really smart. They always were like, you don't like it? No worries. Even if they're being a dick, we'd just be like, like, cool, what would you like?

That's free. You can either eat it or we'll toss it. What would you like? Do you want this? Cool. Done. And we just remake it. Call it a day.

We just like extinguished the problem immediately. Never got exploited. Like some guys like, oh, I could just go and complain every time I come here and get two for the every time I get. Coming in the next day and the next day is, oh,

this steak sucks again. We've definitely had some stuff like that before. We'll throw them out of the restaurant. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Cool. We'll throw them out of the restaurant. And what happens to all the food that gets uneaten?

Because sometimes I see plates where it's like, My God. Like half of the thing. It gets ravaged by the people in the back. Does it? No. Okay. Whoa.

Whoa. What restaurant are you? Dude, I was a bus boy. So like if any food got sent back, you'd know I'm, you know, I'm eating good. Chowing down. That's nasty. I know. Bro, what if someone has like, has something?

Well, you know, I like to think that I'm tuning my immune system. So. Yeah. I got strong. Smart. Yeah. I hate seeing wasted food. Like, I see when someone gets off and they have half their plate, and I'm looking at that thing.

They could take that hard. I could take that home. He has been at a, it was a sushi restaurant, right? And the guy next to you, he wasn't finishing a sushi. You went to this man at another table and asked him for the food. No way. Yeah. It was half a dare.

It was many years ago. Oh, is it a dare? Half a dare. What do you mean half a dare? I joked and I'm like, he's not going to finish that because they paid already. And like half the plate was just uneaten. It was sushi. And I'm like, I wonder if he's going to finish that.

Like, it's going to get thrown out. It was really good. And so a buddy was like, he was like, like you just ask him like really you think that's weird he's like now just ask and i think he's on a date too and i'm like no man it's gonna finish that and he looks down it's like no i was like can i have it he's like sure oh my god that guy must have fucking i bet he still tells that story today i bet he does yeah hey if you're watching this on youtube here he is maybe you know what we need the people to go and find this guy somebody needs to go and like yeah i don't know if

you don't go buy this guy's too yeah it was it's got to happen because it's it's Socky house in Santa Monica, this must have been like, 2016. So, like, it's not that long ago. The people will do their magic. You guys know what to do. Find this man for us, please. And he must have been on a first date. You should take him on a date.

He was on a first date. Probably. I don't know. It seemed like a first date. Like, they gave first date vibes. I don't know. Oh, man. Turns out it's like his wife of 50 years or something like that.

What if that started a fight? She's like, you shouldn't have gave him that food. I wanted it. We got her taking that home. Yeah, we could take that home. That's leftover. Maybe they're not together. more because of that.

Maybe. There's so many domino effects that could have happened in that moment. Yeah, we know. When food is sent back, I never, ever wanted to eat it off the plate. So that's wilding to me.

But that being said, yeah, it's usually, the waste in restaurants is exorbitant. It's, Graham, if you saw how much waste is in a restaurant, it's sickening. It's sickening. It's really bad.

Some restaurants are good about it, but even the ones that try to be good at it, it is. Why? To the point where it depends. I mean, in fine dining, this is something that's not talked about a lot. In fine dining, you know, you want everything to be perfect.

Vegetables don't come perfectly shaped. You need to cut them to be perfectly shaped. Neat doesn't come perfectly shaped. You need to cut it to be perfectly shaped. Which means what happens to all the trim? When you're trimming it down to get a perfect little square on a piece of meat, what happens to all the little strips of meat that you just cut off, right? We try to reuse it.

It doesn't always get reused. sometimes it's not reusable. It should have a junk plate. Like every fine dining, well, maybe not a fine dining. You have that one table in the corner of the junk table. Yeah,

the junk table. You go there, you get a discounted meal. It's all the garbage. I mean, it's funny, it's a funny idea. It wouldn't be about what I would do.

I'm giving this shit away for free. This is what I will be doing. So for to go orders, you have a to go order menu that's totally separate. So you have some, of your menu items, but it's a slightly different menu just for to go orders, right? You had a couple new items on there that you can't get in-house, and then you use the trim to make some of those

things. So let's see if a short-robed dish, right? And you're cutting the short-robed all suede for several hours, falls apart, right? You take all that short-robed trim, you shred it up, and then you press it into a pan, so it's like a flat layer, you weigh it down, you cut it into little squares or rod or whatever shape you want. You pancer it. It's like a crispy little, like shredded beef cake. It's nice. Make that a to-go menu item. Now you've used a trim. You didn't throw it away and you made money off of it. You made a better margin on your overall food cost and you provided value with a new item for two orders. The expectation is a lot lower to go food. It's lower, but also you can make something nice out of it if you're creative. You can make

anything out of anything if you're creative. So I think trim can be used, but most restaurants don't use it. So then when you start to add that up, think about like, let's say, you know, a trash can. Right. The big restaurant trash cans. You know which one of them? I'm talking about the ones that are fucking horrible to fill with the bag. Let's say six of those, get rotated maybe three to four times in a night, filled with some garbage, but a lot of those items like trim and just stuff that goes bad and vegetables and stuff that falls in the ground when sauce gets spilled, which happens all the time. I mean, that every day, almost, you know, like maybe, I don't know, 300 days out of the year,

even more, 350 days out of the year for one restaurant. for one restaurant. Yeah, there's tons of trash. How would you take these experiences for your own restaurant? I mean, sustainability, being ethical, paying people really well. And I mean, it's hard to address them all, right? If it was easy to address, then all restaurants would be doing it. It is hard to do.

So, I mean, I kind of want to go in with that kind of energy of like trying to hit all those points. Let's talk about real quick, paying people well. What do you think about the whole tip culture in America? Do you think that we should just pay servers X amount more and then markup prices X amount more? Because a certain level tip should be expected to be able to pay them a certain wage. Or do you think that, no, they're a service-based industry. Like they can make more money by providing excellent service. What's your take on that?

This doesn't mean you would do it. But what model do you think you would do in your restaurant? It's really hard. I don't know what model I'm going to do. So I can't say what that is because there's so many decisions that have to be. to go into it. It's tough, right? Because, I mean, it makes sense why tips exist.

But I think it sucks that only waiters and waitresses get the tips. What about the people that are cooking the food? Normally, they don't. So it's tough when you're like, you know, let's say, you know, a lead line cook and you've been working at that restaurant for three and a half years and you get paid, let's say, $13 or $14 an hour. And meanwhile, you know, a waiter or waitress is making $100,000 a year. And you're just sitting there like, like, you don't even care about what you're doing.

But I'm back here. I've dedicated my entire life to this, and I'm really good at it. And I make stuff that people love that takes so much time to create, like, and come up with. And, like, some dishes take, like, months to come up with. So I would try to make it in a way that it financially behooves everyone as much as possible. But I really don't know what it's going to look like until I start working on the restaurant. But I can at least say that that's something that's at top of mind for me, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I know with Sugarfish, they do the no tipping.

It's just, it's included. I don't even know if it's a set amount that gets added on. I think it's just built into the menu. And then you just pay and you're done. But I've also seen a lot about tipping fatigue where I even went to like some random like supermarket sort of place. It was like one of those little convenience stores. And just checked out.

Yeah, and they turned around. The turn. And that's a tip. Just press a few buttons right here. Just press a few buttons right here. But this was something where it's like, just scan a few items and then turn it around. It wasn't like a service or anything.

And I look at that thinking like, I don't want to be that guy who's like no tip. So I put something, but then I'm like, is 10% insulting? But then again, he just turns it around. But that's everywhere now.

And I feel like it's turning people off. I heard, I think it was Value Tainment was mentioning that people are now tipping less because of that feature just overall. I could see that. Yeah. It's oil change and they ask for a tip.

Are you? I got that oil change. I swear to God, I got his out. What a hand. Oh, we know, it was a smog test. It wasn't, how was your service? It was a smog test.

It was a small. 20% great. No, but the thing is, it was a cheap smog test. Like, I think it was like $20. And then when I checked out, they had the tip feature. And I always, whenever they flip the thing around, I'm like, you know what? I'm expecting. I'm going to tip.

And I always click the middle one, whatever it is. So my finger, a default went to the middle. I'm like, stupid. I'm tipping for a smog test, but sure, I'll click the middle one. And I look, and as my finger is pressing, it's like 72%. What? I swear to go. God, can they set their own?

Yes. So like, you need to follow this guy around and make sure he doesn't spend money like that. It was, it was like $56, 52. And then like $7. 26 was like the bottom. But the thing, yeah, but the thing is it was such a cheap oil change. I think they like expect people to tip a bunch because it wasn't like, like the owner was the one that was like, you know, that would receive. Oil change is a smog test.

Or sorry, smog test. Smog test, yes. The owner of the smog place like was checking me out. So the tip would go to him. So I'm basically just paying more for the tip. smog test. I wonder if there's got to be like a tax thing going on there. Like maybe tips are done differently or maybe it's what does it done with

Stripe, I believe it? I have no clue. Maybe they process, uh, they get probably a fee too on that tip. So they're making more money the more you tip. It was imagine if every one of your transactions now pays an average 10% more. Yeah. 10% more revenue just for turning that thing around. Yeah.

I can see that. Yeah. That's what that's whack. I always think it's funny whenever I go to a coffee shop and then I'm like, you know what, actually, I'm just going to get like a bottle juice and a water and like maybe one of the prepackaged snacks. And then I see the tip thing and I'm like, do I tip? Because I just grab this out of the refrigerator and then just bought it.

You know what? I wouldn't be bothered as much by it if it weren't anonymous, but I know like they see it and they turn around. And I'm always like just expecting. You know, that's exactly it. I'm always expecting. Like I don't want to. Yeah.

Then that's, that's another thing because you're known as like, oh, the millionaire guy. Yeah, I don't want to be like. When I checked out at the smog thing, I pushed it. It was like 52%. The guy recognized me. So it ended up working in my favor. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. My fiance and I now like sometimes, you know, I don't know if we like watch a movie or something. And I'll be like, oh, come on. Like, you know, let's go watch, you know, TV show or something for like an hour. And then we'll watch something. And then right afterwards she'll pull out the iPad or something. And be like, like, and then like look away. And look away.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just I have a few options. Rate your experience. Yeah. Yeah. I always wonder like, like, when is it going to slow down? Like what other, I don't know, businesses, are they going to extend that whole tipping thing to? Smog test.

It's even on YouTube now. Have you seen the tip feature on YouTube? Yeah. What? Yeah. Yeah, you can turn it on. I recommend turning it on your channel. Every now and then people will send you a tip.

And I get a notification on my phone that like so-and-so's tip. And you could tip anything from like a dollar to, I don't know, a few hundred. But when I say, you know, you know, a few hundred. Right. But when I see. see that little tip feature. I'm like, you know,

usually it's with a comment and I'll respond back. But yeah. I just thought of the next level business idea. So when I invoice Graham, I'm just going to do it in person and I'm going to do the same fee. And you know what? He knows me.

So, so I'm going to judge him based. And I'm going to make the middle one like 52%. Yeah. It's going to be on. It's, turn the camera on on the screen too. So you can see his reaction.

Yeah. It's going to be on on paychecks too. I guarantee like, no, They'll find a way to give that to employers. Isn't that a bonus? Isn't that a bonus? Is that a bonus?

A bonus seems too formal, but a tip seems like, hey, you did a good job this week. Let me. That's a bonus. When I think bonus, I think of a performance bonus or I think end of year bonus or like something like that. But I think just on, let's say you're paid every other week, you wouldn't get a bonus every other week. It's just, I don't know. I could see this extending. It's like a relaxed bonus basically.

Yeah. An informal bonus, but a bonus, I feel like, is something you would expect or work towards. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised, honestly, at this point. Yeah. You know, but I mean, businesses are, more and more every year, businesses are kind of getting more, I feel like picked apart in a way, which for the good and maybe not for the good at the same time. I don't know. I don't know if you have an opinion on that.

I feel like with Twitter being what it is, I just feel like businesses are kind of being pushed more to be more ethical and better in many good ways. but then there's other elements where I'm like, why is anyone even talking about this? Just like go fucking get a job. Go, you know what I mean? Or I don't know. Give me an example. I don't know. I've seen some of the Drew Gooden.

Was it Drew Gooden who was talking about the Twitter wars between companies? Oh, I never saw that. Yeah, basically companies like Taco Bell were getting in arguments with like Del Taco over like this stuff on Twitter. I think it's hilarious. What? I have to see this. I don't think that's what he was talking about.

What are you thinking? What am I thinking? Yeah. I thought you were talking about like companies trying to, I mean, how do I put this? No, I was thinking, I was thinking broad stroke from like a, from like employee to company rather than a company to company. This definitely were talking about different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, well, because we were, wait, what were we originally talking about that I leaned into this? Tipping. Tipping. Boney structures. Yeah. So like, you're talking about bonus structure, tipping and all these different things. I feel like in general, from a society standpoint, because of like Twitter, there's a lot of conversation around like trying to be more ethical and being better for you know the people and

being less geared towards you know these mass monopolies and how do we make people's lives better which I think is good and important it's just like but there's sometimes you see a tweet where you're just like I don't know about that like that seems like it's not a good addition to the club and so when you start talking about like tipping here tipping there it's like at what point do we draw the line you know what I mean is it going to be drawn at business tipping yes thank you so much for My ibupropin. The receipt's going to be that long. Yeah.

Somehow they'll find a way to make it longer. I don't know. I don't think there's ever going to be a line that's drawn. I think it's constantly going to be pushed and moved around, and it's just going to be whatever the general sentiment is at the time. I think people, they're getting to the breaking point. Because people are finally starting to talk about the. That's true.

The tipping thing. Now it's starting to happen. It's a good point. Yeah. And I think that there will be an uprising, a tipping revolution. You mean more tipping or? or basically saying no more tipping. Like,

no, like tipping where tipping is reasonable. Yeah. The thing is like if I check out at, it doesn't happen at Starbucks, but some like, you know, I get an assaibal.

Starbucks now does tipping. They do? Yeah. Okay. I use the app pay, so I guess it doesn't. Smart. That's how you get around.

Break it around. Just got to bring cash everywhere. Just paying cash up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no. I don't know.

I think that there will be an uprising and people will be like, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore. Yeah. At least where it's, it's, It's, you know, not necessarily, like people aren't performing a long service for you. But you know what, everywhere you go, people provide a service.

Like, imagine going to your doctor's office and you have a tip thing. Oh, my God. It's just everything is a service. If a doctor asks me for a tip, I would lose my mind. Just perform the surgery. How happy were you with your service? Yeah. But they asked for the tip beforehand.

Yeah, Doc, you make $500,000 a year. I'm not tipping you, sorry. It's just weird how, like, an Osai Bowl could be a 25% tip, and that's like the middle button, right? And then you go to a restaurant and the person's literally serving you. you pouring you water, doing all this stuff. And the difference in service is just like crazy. But although, yeah, sure, the price of the assaibal is smaller, so the actual monetary gain from the person gets the time.

But it's the same percentage. Yeah. Which for me, it doesn't really make sense. It's effort. Effort and time. Yeah. And time. Like a waiter or waitress is serving you for an hour at least.

This is some, you know, here's the thing. I don't want to say anything that would make it feel like a service, somebody working in service doesn't deserve to make more money. I think they need more money. I think it's good. I think tipping is good. And I want them to get tipped. But it's not really being measured appropriately as what I think,

or at least accurately. Why don't like 5, 10, you know, 15, 12 or something like that? But then again, the price is lower, though. That's the other thing. But the service is lower. That's true. But the ultimate tip is also going to be lower every time. If you go to, well, I guess maybe not with a coffee shop.

No, because the turnover is so fast. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like you could probably generate potentially more in a coffee shop because there's a line. It's just like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I think what would make sense is if the tips were pooled and they went to everybody, then it might feel better. But I feel like the tips with restaurants that are the biggest problem is that they go to one person. They didn't, your restaurants, they didn't tip out the busters and the hostesses and whatnot.

Did. I always assumed that it was. They actually tipped the kitchen. No. So I mind that the chefs would get tipped as well as actually they were the only people that worked in a restaurant that got paid higher than minimum wage, the chefs at my restaurant. Not the ones that I worked at. Interesting.

Yeah. There was no tipping for that. As far as I remember, I don't remember anything tipped. But there are more places doing it. There are new restaurants that are actually having chefs be waiters at the same time. They would cook their food and then they would run food and then they would get tipped out. So they'd get their salary or hourly and then they would get tipped out as well as waiters. That's got to be so stressful.

If you're good. I don't think both. Okay. Well, it's with the way that you systematize the line and everything, like you basically switch off, I think. I've never worked in a restaurant like that, but I've heard about it. So I'm not sure how the full system works. But it's cool. Yeah.

Make more money. Yeah, so I just have two things to say here before we wrap up the episode. The first I just want to thank Lexar, my official card sponsor. What happened to the card on camera? But Graham, you took the card out of my camera. I did? Yes. Why do you think?

Why is it missing? Because you're the only person who takes cards out of cameras around there. No, Jack did. Don't you dare try to defer blame on me. I did not touch the card in that camera. My fam. I had my own card. Anyway, somebody took my Lexar card.

I'm going to be asking Lexar if they would send me another one. I'll take another one too. I want one too. You want a Lexar? Sorry, Lexar. You want a Lexar card, Josh? Yeah, I was sure. Oh, okay.

Sure. So anyway, thank you, Lexar. But the next thing that I want to mention is, Josh, actually, during this podcast, I actually thought of the perfect Christmas gift for my wife. So I ordered your cookbook. Oh, yes. Coming today.

But if she asked, you gave it to me on this podcast and it was a gift because I'm not trying to send any mixed messages. Okay. So I just need you to back me up on that. It would have been amazing. Would you have been able to sign it? Oh, yeah. Sorry about that.

Why don't you do this? You can keep that book and then I'll send all you guys books here. Oh, my gosh. That would be great. Done. That would be cool. That would be amazing. Thank you.

Thank you so much. We also have some bankroll coffee for you too. Yeah, we'll link to your info in the description along with your cookbook. I'm excited to get that. Yeah, it'll be fun. You guys will get, I'll send a little couple things for you guys. Send you some salt. It'll be good.

All right. You know what? I could get Nick DiGiovanni's salt. Oh, no, no, no. No, no. What's that? No, you got your own salt? Now I have to make my own salt for you.

Come on, man. Come on, come on. Nick's a good guy. He's a sweet guy. What do you think of him? He's a good guy. He's a good guy. Is he good chef?

Gordon Ramsey. Well, I mean, I don't know Nick's background, to be honest. I don't know. He was a master chef. He was one of the finalists. I know that. Yeah. I don't know what restaurants he worked at, though.

But I know that he, I think he's cooked in food before. But I met him once, and we had a really good time. We, like, chatted for a little bit. You should be doing a collab with him. I think that blow up the internet. Yeah. See, imagine you two going, going off against Gordon Ramsey, and he's the one he, like, taste the food.

Yeah. That'd be fun. No, you got to include all the guys. You got to have Guga. You got to have Babish. Yeah. All those guys. Yeah.

All competing for the title. Just like the Marvel universe. That would be amazing. Matt Stoney eating it. Yeah. Yeah. That would be insane. Matt Stoney passes away on this way.

Amazing. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for having me on the podcast. A ton of fun. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much. Make sure to get your free stop.

Until next time. Up until next time. Wow. Their sponsor. Usually speak over each other? Yes. All the time. Yeah.

Guys, Follow me on Instagram real quick. Thank you so much for watching. At the end of the podcast episode, when people are shouting out stuff, we always interrupt the other person shouting out.