The Joe Rogan Experience - #1704 - C.K. Chin

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

C.K. Chin is the Austin, Texas-based restaurateur behind such popular eateries as Swift's Attic, Wu Chow Austin, and Native Hostel.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Happy birthday, my friend. Thank you. I did not know it was your birthday when we scheduled this. Yeah. So it's exciting. You know, my sister's birthday is today as well.

We're five years apart, exactly, to the day. What? Yeah. How weird. Yeah, my mom had the day. What? Yeah. How weird. Yeah, my mom had great timing. That's amazing timing. And so, yeah, so forever, probably since I was like 10, it's been her birthday.

That's crazy odds. Yeah. Like what are the odds? Like five years apart on the same day? Yeah. I guess I thought about that before. I mean, I guess the odds are just one out of 365. I mean, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

Are they really? Because 25 years apart, still, we only have 365 days a year. So it has to be one of those days. I guess. Mathematically speaking, I think. I feel like there's something missing in that equation. Right. You know what I mean?

It's like one of them trick problems. Right, right, right, right. It's way higher than that. Yeah. Probability is a little less than 1 in 500,000 of a family with two children who aren't twins that share the same birthday. Really? Ooh, see? Maybe this is actually for two years.

Well, okay. I think that's what it was. Sorry. They're looking for two kids that were born two years apart on the same day. Yeah, that might actually. Actually, I guess as you get closer, probably because there's some sort of rebound rate. Like you can't, you know, you can't just five years apart.

It's like, all right. It's still wild. It is wild. No, and she waited. She was due in August, mid-August. And then she just chilled and hit the snooze until my birthday. Yeah, it was great. I was saying the only thing I remember really of that whole situation was that my mom missed my fifth birthday party. And I was like, where's mom?

They're like, well, she's having your sister. And I'm like, well, why can't she be at my birthday party? It doesn't have to do with anything. It's kind of like. That's hilarious. That's what you remember. Yeah, I do remember that pretty clearly. Pretty clearly.

But, you know, obviously I love her. The young one steal the thunder. But it was really great. You know, I think that it was, you know, I love her the young one steal the thunder but it was it was really great you know I think that it was you know she and I were very close and it kind of created

this kind of twin connection thing that I've always really kind of enjoyed it's like it's a cool story it's a little thing that you can talk about and remember

and it's really it's great so you both have birthdays the same day yeah and we're always it was kind of cool to always kind of it was cool to share it

in a way I've never been someone that was very possessive on that kind of stuff so it's great to share that with somebody i always felt sorry for kids that had like christmas birthdays that's a totally different thing i agree then you get that you get that christmas slash birthday gift i would just lie to my kid i'd be like dude you were born in july let's get the fuck out of here with this Christmas shit. Yeah, for sure. Because that's bullshit for a kid. Because they look for that, you know, that's a big deal, your birthday, for at least the first few years of your life.

I had a, you know, I have an interesting perspective also. My mother was, you know, single mother raised me and my grandmother. And I always thought that you should celebrate the parent for like the first 10 years or something. That's a good call. As a kid, it's kind of like, I mean, what'd you should celebrate the parent for like the first 10 years or something. That's a good call. As a kid, it's kind of like, I mean, what did you do in the beginning? It's like your mother is like, happy birthday. Good job on what you created.

And then we'll see if this kid is worth celebrating later on. Give him a little time. The thing is that that's the only birthdays that mean a fuck. Like when I see a grown man at a show going, it's my birthday. Like, bitch, your birthday was 30 fucking years ago. It is not today. You're a grown man at a show going it's my birthday like that's right bitch your birthday was 30 fucking years ago It is not today. You're a grown man. That's right. You know that's that is some weak shit Yeah, we all have excited about having a bird. It's my bird. Thank you. Dang Yeah, especially like the people that come to the bars and ask for free oh fuck off right yeah in the hospitality 21

that's got to be annoying 28 like what you should have a job yeah we shouldn't be asking for a free drink that's right ever ever but what do you have to do in those situations do you have to go do you have to like kind of accommodate them i mean at the end of the day for me it's like it's opportunity cost the amount of time that, for me, it's like it's opportunity costs. The amount of time that it would like why ruin this person's experience. This right. You know, it's we are if you're truly in this like I'm in the hospital hospitality industry for the purest reason is which I really enjoy taking care of people. So if somebody hands you a roadmap on how to make them happy use it like why why what where's the goal and what do I win there nobody taking keeping score of some sort of you

know global you know scoreboard that says that he you were right and this customers wrong you know it's like no who cares like you gave me that opportunity to make you happy by giving you a drink and you get to tell your friends that I got a free drink and then go for it here you know that's a good attitude worth the price of admission for me it's got to be hard though because you are celebrating twats yeah well it's it's it's hard insofar as it depends on like the reasoning you know i think that if there's some people out there that's maybe just trying to get one up on somebody and trying to get some free stuff and whatever like that you know they're just taking advantage of you like but how long you been in the restaurant business

I mean I started bartending you know early 1819 so for 224 years so it was one of your first jobs ever I started college early I was 16 and then I mr. smarty pants I was because I was born in September. And then my family wasn't like, well, you're supposed to wait another year. And they're like, nope, we'll put you in a Montessori school. Get you started now. And then went into school. And my last year in high school, they switched over to this block scheduling thing. So I ran out of classes. switched over to this block scheduling thing. So I ran out of classes. And my family, also my mother, put me in summer school every year because she heard about summer school and was like, yeah, go to school.

Continue going to school. And I ran out of classes. And so I was able to take some college classes and then I got accepted into college and went that summer before I turned 17. What was it like being around a bunch of fucking grown-ass kids when you're basically 16? I was an old man.

I really, it's weird. I have this kind of juxtaposition, I feel like, too, also with my upbringing and everything like that. I've always been kind of an old mindset. I kind of walk around and look at these kids, like, what are you all doing? How come? I don't know. and walking around and look at these kids.

Like, what are you all doing? How come? I don't know. But that's where the thing was. I think I was forced to kind of grow up a little bit faster with a single parent. And my grandmother raised me and then having to help with my sister and everything. But I'm also very childlike in that way because I think a lot of that kind of got taken away a little bit. So I still enjoy cartoons and Marvel movies or whatever it is, and these type of things, these escapism stuff that I feel like

I just never really kind of fully got out of the way. And so it's like you grew up fast, and now it's like you're making up for lost time and doing that kind of stuff. I started embracing them again. I thought they were foolish like comic books and comic book movies and stuff like that. I thought they were foolish for a while. And then as I got older, I go, but wait a minute, I liked those. And then I started embracing them as I got in,

I guess, into my thirties. Yeah. I think, I think you should have a better understanding. And again, not to get so super deep on superhero movies, but I think there is something that, that really kind of shines a mirror on people to to if you have this blank canvas and be able to create something as to whatever you wanted and then you can create this person it's kind of interesting i remember i forgot there's an essay going around or something that's talking about like superman for instance and like how there is some interesting psychology behind it the idea that everyone on krypton is superman and his alter ego is actually a human as opposed to every other superhero. His alter ego is their superhero, but he actually has to pretend to be normal because he just himself is, you know, whatever.

It's like this weird kind of thing. And I remember reading that kind of stuff and thinking about that and thinking about how like most recently, I think Spider-Man, they finally cast a young, young guy as opposed to like a grown man. And there was like, what kind of stuff would you go through as a teenager that all of a sudden discovered that you have all this stuff going on? And they did a good job in the most recent movies about him going to high school and telling his best friend and getting caught about it and getting all this stuff. I feel like there's like as an adult watching it is not the same. I think I really enjoy it on a different level. But it's cool. Yeah.

Well, it's just superhero movies. They're just fun. That's all it is. That's right. It's just fun. It's junk food. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Junk food for the mind. Yeah. I think that there's a time like when people come by and say, this didn't have any. It's like, are you arguing the realism? People who pick it apart like that? It's just kind of strange. They can do whatever they want.

If that's what you want to do with a superhero movie, go back and do that about Bugs Bunny too, stupid. That's right. Exactly. Oh, he got shot in the face. He could totally not survive that. Yeah. Exactly. He's a talking rabbit, bro.

Yeah, exactly. None of it makes any sense. You know what I watched the other day that I haven't seen in a long time? The Watchmen. Yes. That's a fucked up movie. Yeah, but that is so well written. And especially the new one.

Do you watch the series? No. I was watching the series for a little, but Dr. Manhattan's bullshit. Like, Dr. Manhattan's supposed to be a glowing nuclear blue guy with a giant dick, and all of a sudden he's a regular guy? Right, right, right, right, right. I was like, what is this nonsense? Right. That's like if the Hulk was just a guy who, like, went to CrossFit.

Wait, wait, wait. In the HBO series? Yes. Yeah. I mean, so. Bro, he's supposed to be super jacked with a giant dick. That's true. Okay. That's the, that's, that's Dr. Manhattan. That's right. He's supposed to be able to like time travel and do whatever he wants and go to other planets and shit.

Yeah. He seems way too normal. Yeah. Let me see what he looks like. Pull up what he looks like. Cause the one in the, in the Watchmen watchman the movie like it looks like what you'd expect a god to look like he's got the crazy white eyes he's almost like animated whereas everybody else in this show is you know basically just a person with superpowers for sure and some of them don't even have superpowers and i think that that's that's again that's one of those things where living in a world how was this what is that is that? Yeah, look at him. Get the fuck out of here. How is that Dr. Manhattan? That's ridiculous.

The real Dr. Manhattan in the movie is like a perfect specimen. He's like a god. He glows. And then this other one is just like a dude with makeup on. Like, they just got lazy. Like, I don't understand it. There's a, what is the, oh, my God. I can't, I'm blanking on it.

Look at him. Look at that. That's not it. That's not it. That's not it. What is that? That's a costume. It's just some guys for hanging out at Comic Con or something.

Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank God. I threw up in my mouth. Let himself go. It just, I just watched it for a little bit bit and I was like, I don't know. It's missing.

But it is more raw. I think that when you're talking about a show or that kind of stuff, when you start to kind of blend these superhero situations into real life, like people aren't going to be cool with everything. And they're not all going to be cool. You know, like that's the thing. I think there have been a couple of dystopian type of things where what if superman was bad he decided to do terrible shit it's like we what could we do well that's the thing about the watchman right

like the comedian is a terrible person in the watchman yeah the guy with the mustache and the cigar i mean he's fucking horrible horrible he's a murderer yeah you know and but yet he's a superhero it's very yeah very conflicted yeah the power yeah absolute power corrupts absolutely that type of thought process right there's what is the um what's that move that the series the guy that come out same similar situation where um it's a superhero story and it's's about the same thing, about these superheroes like Dr. No, sorry, Mr. Something. God, man, I'm blanking on it.

But they basically go follow these superheroes that just aren't good people. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. The Boys. The Boys. I didn't watch that. Is that good? It's good.

I thought it was like a Watchmen ripoff. You can kind of see it that way, but it's obviously – it's just very well written. I'm going to see it that way. Yeah, you can see it that way. It's like when you make evil superheroes. But it's really – it is true. I mean if you had – if you gave somebody a ridiculous amount of power or whatever it is, how could you possibly expect that person to just decide to choose pure. Right.

That's what we have right now with the government. Yeah, give a lot of power. It's the same fucking thing. Yeah, exactly. It's a weird time for that. So how long have you opened your restaurant for? How long has it been open for? Is this your first?

Was Wu Chao your first place? Swiss Attic was. That's when I first met you. Aubrey actually brought you in for dinner. was this i mean 2012 really probably 2013 something like that and where was that it's upstairs on congress upstairs uh above the elephant room um the elephant room the jazz bar right there in congress oh okay i know where that is so right there on the fourth in congress yeah so god i forgot about that place came in you were in town randomly i think it was The jazz bar right there in Congress. Oh, okay. I know where they yeah, so right there on the fourth in Congress Yeah, so I forgot about that. Yeah came in you were in town randomly I think it was just right when he was starting up on it and and brought you in for dinner I think that was the first time like I said, I was working so that was your first pot

That was my first spot and what happened that spot still there. Yeah, it's existing We just we were a it's a small upstairs spot that was very kind of aiming towards crowded, high energy sharing food, which is probably the least type of places you want to open up in the last two years. Like that dynamic really exposed like, yeah, this is not what I think a lot of people want. But we've you know, we've as we've kind of gauged into it, calmed down a little bit and spread some people out a little bit. I think people are obviously more, more okay with it now. But early on it was like, man, how, how in the world are we going to pivot from this? Well, why the idea of like sharing food?

Like the idea of like doing things family style? Yeah, it was the, so are you talking about why it was bad or why, how that, well, why did I pick that? No, why is it bad? Well, I think at the time it was the idea – Because of the pandemic. The pandemic. Yeah.

It's just that kind of concept. One of the other groups I'm a partner with at Native right over here on the east side was a hostel. And, you know, the entire vibe was to go and stay in a room with a bunch of strangers and meet people. entire vibe was to go and stay in a room with a bunch of strangers and meet people. But when we tried to pivot, when we tried to reopen and it was like, all right, well, let's keep people safe and spread out the beds and make sure that the beds are socially distant and all this other stuff. I mean, the first night that we opened, the first person that sneezed in the middle of their night, we get a call that was like, I need to move rooms. We're just like, yo, this is not going to work. The dynamic isn't what we're trying to do. The is this not gonna work this is this this the dynamic isn't isn't

what we're trying to do the whole hostile thing like you just think immediately about foreign countries you don't think about america when you think of hostiles right but it's you know we took it and kind of turned it on its head and at one point it's pre-pandemic we were doing very well because i think there was it was a nicer option it wasn't a cot and you bought you paid for a blanket for a dollar that type it wasn't a cot and you paid for a blanket for a dollar, that type of thing. It wasn't for economic purposes. It was really for the social purposes. The idea that you're traveling by yourself in a city you don't know in, and it's possible that you'll end up staying in a room with some really interesting people or some people who are also traveling by themselves and have nothing to do.

So there's a bar right outside. So the hostel, the native was, is also a bar and we'd have a DJ on a Friday night. And so you just go, Hey, you want to go and grab a drink kind of thing. It's kind of enforced interaction that I think if you're traveling in a, especially if you're traveling, it's, it helps kind of lubricate that, that trip rather than forcing you to go out to a bar and then walk into it. And that kind of stuff is just. So like when you come up with an idea like that,

how does that ever go from the meeting to fruition? Because that seems like just to get other people on board with that. So this one I actually joined on as a partner after the conception of it all. But in our conversation of it, it was a cultural thing. It was the idea that we should take this, I, this culture of, of the kind of person that likes to travel that way, that likes to meet random people or to, you know, to just kind of roll the dice on that. You know, there is true. I mean, it's a couple of people forever, whatever reason, if you have that mentality to be able to say that the odds are that somebody else is in this room,

has this exact same mentality, you're kind of ahead of the game. These are people, these are six people that probably have similar situations than you, as opposed to at a hotel where who knows why somebody's there. But here, the odds are you're saying, look, I'm not super concerned about my privacy as staying in my own little private room. I'm a social kind of cat because I picked this one place that has a bar in it and doing concerts, DJs, whatever like that, that kind of energy. I'm also looking to experience Austin in this kind of way, which they on the east side, like a lot of the little check boxes that check off to say that this is a kind of person that I am. So, um, you know, especially the East side, right? Yeah.

And then he says filled with like very odd characters. Yeah. It's a very, it's a watering, it's like an oasis I described as like, it's an oasis of where, you know, you'll see a rhino and a zebra and then they, they're all just there. There's no reason why we're all there. Just, we just haven't all gathered there. but that was the kind of concept was saying that all right we like that aspect of the culture but we also don't like the idea that this is a place where you're trying is somebody save money so you're saying you're going for a 19 bed so you're trying to save money while you're backpacking through europe that kind of experience it's a totally different

need for a hostel as opposed to this one. It just says, you know, we're paying $40 a bed, $50 a bed, but there's four beds, six beds in that room. But if you, let's say a lot of people were groups of four that would rent a room with four beds in it, and you're getting a downtown hotel for, you know, $160, and it's on the east side right there as opposed to, you know, $ bucks. And it's on the East side right there, as opposed to, you know, $400 at the Four Seasons or something. Well, if you have a group of people and you travel

together and you can all rent the room together, that's a great deal. You can do that too. Yeah. So there's, there was that little mix. So it was fun. It was great. It was starting to come into its own and, and really kind of doing that. And then the whole world blew up. One of the things that I liked about doing Stubbs when we were doing shows there was you would always come by with all kinds of different food from different restaurants. You really celebrate all the local places and establishments. And it seemed like you would really take pride in bringing us like these burgers from this one local spot or pizza from another local spot or that kind of stuff yeah that's how it got started i mean i met dave years ago um got introduced to him through uh questlove amir who's a friend of mine who's also a foodie and that's we met through

food as well and um i just remember he was coming here and, you know, no shade on corporate type restaurants. But it was like one of the conversations we have, especially per people who are on tour. It's like you can a lot of times that kind of experience is comforting. Like it's like people eat McDonald's on the road because it always tastes exactly the same or whatever it is. But at the same time, I'm like, if you had somebody to just guide you through whatever city you're in, like, why wouldn't you? Like, why would you go to Philly and not have a Tony Luke's or something like that? What's Tony Luke's? It's a cheesesteak spot or Max's or anything.

Any of the local cheesesteak spots that are dope. Like, when I go there and I ask somebody who lives in Philly, they'll definitely say don't go to, you know, Patsy Gino's or whatever it is because that's a tourist trap, you know, whatever it is. Right. And so it's like the same thing it's like so i was telling they would sit there and say where should we go eat and then find out that they ended up going to you know like one of the nights was shake shack shake shack's great i like shake shack burgers but it's like we have local burger spots that are dope that that would love to have a chance to serve and expand their audience of people who had to experience their food. What's the best local burger spot? And if you don't say Golden Tiger, I'll lose respect for you.

I brought Golden Tiger to y'all. Did you? Yeah, I did. I did. And then I also brought these. I found out about it from Phillip. Phillip from Sushi Bar ATX? Yeah, Phillip Lee.

Yeah. Yeah, he's the shit. And they're fantastic. And the Smash Burger, that's my style of burger, too. You know, that just basic one. The other ones that I was doing is Bad Larry's. Bad Larry's. Yeah.

It's a pop-up spot. They own a couple bars, and then they do this thing once a week. How do you find them? They're on social media. I'll connect you. But yeah, they just do a pop-up, and then you have to pre-order it. It's a burger club. Yeah, it's a burger club.

Oh, a burger club. So fancy. How Austin of them. But I brought them backstage, too. One of their days, too. But it's like, you know, that's the vibe. And then also, you know, burgers range. You know, I think that if you really talk about somebody who, like I do as much as I love food,

it's like, yeah, there's a steak burger there's a are you a guy that likes them flat-ass skinny burgers or a thick meaty burger flat-ass skinny burger why is that i think that there's a textural caramelizational type thing that happens when that happens and i think it's the combo that squishy bun that cheese american cheese that's there's something nostalgic about that, I think, for me, as opposed to a steakhouse burger, which I'm like, if I'm at a steakhouse, I'm going to eat a steak. Yeah, I'm not eating a steakhouse burger at a steakhouse, but I do like a fat burger, a fat, juicy one. Yeah. It's also harder to cook. Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

You have to make sure it's not dry. That's right. Because when you bite into one of those and it's dry, it's such a bummer. Oh, that big gray, that inch of gray band. Dude, I used to get at Fuddruckers. You know Fuddruckers? Hell yeah. They don't have those out here, do they? There's one. Is there? There's one left. But they have ostrich burger. Really? Yes. that was what I always would get dude ostrich burger rare Yeah, oh my goodness with they have that fake cheese that squirty cheese Say you pump on yes, it's like like ballpark nacho cheese But it's like a jalapeno Jack. Yes, got some kick to it. Yeah, oh my goodness And then they give you two potatoes worth of wedges

like just a whole bunch of potatoes yeah that was great and fresh baked buns and stuff like that i mean it's and and i think that's the that's the it's the whole the the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to burgers yeah to me i think that's the um so for me that's that's where it where it lies it's just I think it's somewhere. I was saying this to somebody the other day. I cannot distinguish delicious and nostalgic. I think that scratches the same itch in my brain. Like when somebody talks to me or something, it's like, do I really like it? And like, yeah.

Give me an example. Give you an example. A bologna sandwich on white bread, you know. With mayonnaise? Yeah, with mayonnaise and cheese. It's delicious. Delicious. Is it delicious? Yes.

Or is it because we grew up eating it and it really kind of gets you there? No, it's fucking good. Yeah, well, hey, I mean. Don't you think? I think it's delicious, but I really think it comes from that, like, weird stuff about it is good.

I like how it sticks to the roof of your mouth. Yeah. That gumminess to it. Right. I like that. The bread. Yeah, and we're not allowed to eat white bread now like i think that someone would pop out of a closet to say what the fuck you doing eating white bread like you don't spread yeah the sugar right it's like it's a it's it's solid pastry right and so enjoying that all together is something we're not really allowed to do anymore and so when i have that it's just

like the only time i'm allowed to have white bread is at barbecue joints. Right. They give you a whole loaf of it. Get a whole loaf of white bread. That's right. And I just. Do you ever eat the bread at a bar?

I've never eaten white bread at a barbecue place. I usually save at least one sandwich. I make a perfect bite sandwich. You know, I'll do the whole backyard barbecue style with the bread some potato salad some slaw some cream corn some brisket some mac and cheese whatever making it to this amalgam weird white bread burrito type thing and and take at least a bite of that i guess you could do that but for me like the tastes are so good like a real good brisket yeah i don't want to fuck that up yeah white bread. Yeah, you don't want to. That's what I'm saying.

It is just to scratch that itch. The furthest I get is I dip it in a little sauce. Yeah, and you shouldn't have to. You want to taste the smoke. You want to taste all that stuff too. Yeah. But it comes from, I think, again, having not access to that quality of stuff. That's one of the

craziest things about Austin is the variety of barbecue. I mean, this is absolutely the craziest things about Austin is the variety of barbecue. I mean, this is absolutely the craziest barbecue place I've ever been to in my life. And it's recent. Because you can't survive if you're not good. Yeah. And I think when people ask me about Texas barbecue, I'm like, it's the Olympics. Meaning between first and last place of like the 100-yard dat, I mean, the dude, the last

guy is still pretty fucking fast. Yeah. You know? And so like there's people who don't make it into the Olympics right but when you take the top 10 best barbecues in Austin I mean you're splitting hairs like you right when you go like Terry Black's la barbecue Franklin style switch Mickle Thwaites there's so many good ones exactly and so like this place is so spoiled in that regard yeah and then you Style Switch, Micklethwaite's. There's so many good ones. Right, exactly. And so. Like, this place is so spoiled in that regard. Yeah, and then you start to gauge really off of sides. Like, I think that's, to me, it's kind of like, do I feel like.

Who's got the best sides? It's, you know, it depends on each one, you know. Like, if you have like a. The barbecue's got incredible mac and cheese to me. I really love that. But if you have like an open, like if you have an open day and you have a thing for barbecue do you have a direction you lean at i so here's i lean towards also some convenience you know i love i love aaron and he's a great guy but i don't want to call in favors

like it's just not fair that line is preposterous preposterous and so to like, all right, well, then Terry Blacks is the only one that opens through. They don't sell out. Like all these other kind of boutique-y spots, if you don't go there for lunch, you're not having food. Terry Blacks opens for dinner. Terry Blacks has the most ridiculous array of smokers. That's right. These enormous propane tanks that they've converted into smokers. They were explaining to me how many cows die every day for their restaurant it's crazy yeah it's a nutty number man they'll give you a tour

though which is pretty sweet and there's an artisanship to it too oh for sure for sure oh they had like he has uh like a legal pad like this written down with all the briskets in time like the time when they went in yeah and when they're wrapping them and they're spraying them with apple cider vinegar and I mean, God damn. And that science to that is fundamentally mind blowing

because you don't, it's like during the pandemic when everybody was fucking with sourdough bread and I was just experimenting. I still have the starter alive just because. During the pandemic

that was a thing? During quarantine. How about that? But that was a thing during quarantine. How about that? But that was a thing. Everyone's doing sourdough because we couldn't find yeast anywhere. So people were starting to fuck around sourdough. And then for me at least, especially anybody who has any sort of desire,

culinary type stuff, I was trying to do stuff that took, if it took normally 30 minutes, I try to make it take eight hours. Like it was like, for instance, I made a sandwich. I made a BLT sandwich where I cured my own bacon.

I grew lettuce and tomatoes. How do you cure bacon? What do you have to do? Take pork belly, mix of salt, sugar, spices, and then let that cure. But when you say cure, what does it entail? So curing is kind of the chemical process of basically using salt or some sort of other, you know, salt and a mix of other things to draw out moisture to kind of preserve it. So are you refrigerating it while you're doing this?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's basically just covering it with spices? And salt. Mostly salt. And then pulling out the moisture and then, you know, whenever you do that, it infuses flavor into it, and then you smoke it. And then once you smoke it, then it becomes bacon. And when you smoke it, you're smoking it at a very, very low temperature? Relatively, yeah.

What are you doing it at? You don't have to. For me, I don't know. It was 225 degrees, you know, or something like that. Yeah. Because all I had was a little. I didn't have a Traeger or anything like that, so I was just using a probe thermometer trying to make sure that it didn't go. So you just had a regular offset smoker?

Yeah, offset smoker. And so for me, that whole, try to make the bread, made my own mayonnaise, made real, made butter from cream. Jesus. And made. Were you out there doing that thing? No you can actually make real butter from cream with a stand mixer with a food processor Oh that seems like cheating

It is a little bit Seems like you're supposed to like churn I have to build my own churn Fuck all that It took me three days to make a BLT and I was like alright what's next but it was not to the point where I was like, all right this does this thing this recipe needs chicken stock Well, let me make chicken stock from scratch because you were just bored

Well, it was unprecedented amount of free time unprecedented, especially someone in the business that works. That's the thing about Brisket right like smoked brisket is impossible to do quickly. That's right. It's one of the beautiful things about it. That's right I mean any shortcuts exponentially reduces I was watching a video the other day online where they were using pellet grill there were they did an oven a pellet grill and an offset smoker and they were trying to figure out what's the best way and they said like with blind taste test everyone said offset smoker yeah every time they tested it like people were like this one's better yeah just because of the way that

the smoke has to cool down there's some science behind that yeah but that's that was it which saying that what i was going with this saying with that time you don't know you you don't know you messed up until it's over a day later later, half a day. So those type of cooking experiences, I don't even understand how people get good at that. Right. Because I remember I opened up a sushi bar years ago when we were doing taste testing for the rice. And the chef was cook a batch of rice with some kombu and a little this and a little that and that. But every batch took an hour or so.

And the batch had to come up. We had to let it cool. We had to cut the vinegar in there and cut the – and then taste it and go, nah, that's too sweet. And so we'd have to start our process over again. So to taste four batches of rice took us seven hours or whatever it was. We're just waiting for the rice to get done. And so it's like these type of things, like there's really a lesson in patience because that's the thing.

It's like you're trying to do brisket, I don't know, until the next morning and then you come back and it's like, oh, the fire was too hot. I cooked it too much. Well, the good news is today with YouTube, there's plenty of tutorials where you can learn how to do it correctly and everybody's everybody's more than willing to show you the right rubs and how to spray it down and you know whether you use aluminum foil or whether you use butcher paper there's there's a but there is something at the end of the day there's the skill that there is some level of that there's some talent that whatever it is the adjustment of recognizing when something is one way or when something is next like when you when you when you just get

better at it right get better at it but you have to know what you did wrong. That was the part. So with making with bread, I don't know what I did wrong. Like I'd make two loaves two days apart because it takes all day to rise it and fold it and all this. And then one day it'd be great and the next day it'd be flat. And I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know if the AC was turned on too high, if I was too aggressive with it, if I needed it too much, needed not enough. And so that takes some mentorship there for,

for someone like an Aaron or someone like, you know, somebody from a, you know, a barbecue like Allie to come by and sit there and tell me, Hey, you see right there, you see that jiggle. It's you need to turn the fire up or you need to spread it a little bit less or

this little thing or put it, put this one in the back where it's hotter and put this one that forward and you got to do this or whatever and that comes from experience too but at the end of the day like they don't teach that aspect until you have to be standing right next to you yeah the massive amount of time spent barbecuing yeah they're like those folks that you talked about like la barbecue or franklin's or terry black's like they like just the sheer volume of knowledge that they have. Yeah. And specific dishes.

I mean, if you look at their menu, they cook like 10 things. Yeah. You know, and that's it. And that's it. And they got that shit dialed in. And you think about that's generational too. I mean, we had a conversation about whether or not, you know, Texas barbecue might be one of the few purely American dishes. It started from Germany.

But it's like this style with whatever it is. It's not smoked meats. I don't mean, I was just talking about this, whatever it is. But isn't that is the reason why it's here is German immigrants moved to Texas and then they were smoking meat and then just started changing it and adding it. Well, it's a difference between like East Coast Italian food versus Italian food from Italy. It's very different. Right. Pizza. Yeah. Pizza. Well, just spaghetti and meatballs.

Right. Spaghetti and meatballs. Yeah. There's so many dishes. Yeah. There's so many dishes. Lasagna. There's so many dishes that are like very much considered Italian cuisine, but they're not really in Italy. Like you go to Italy, maybe they make their now. With Chinese food. Like what is it? Like American food. Like what's a Chinese American dish? General Tso's chicken. Really? Yeah. General Tso's is not a Chinese dish? That was invented like in the seventies. There's a great, there's a great documentary called The Search for General Tso.

And they go back and show this dish to a bunch of people in China and Taiwan and all the places. And they're like, I've never even heard that before in my life. That's interesting. But it is. It was brought in by immigrants and it was a cooking thing where they made adjustments to the demographic they were cooking for. They made it a little bit sweeter. They had access to, you know, a perfect example is American broccoli

is typically served with general sauce chicken, but that broccoli doesn't exist. The big florets, that broccoli really doesn't exist in China proper. You know, we have gai lan, that's our, that's why they call it Chinese broccoli. You know, that type of, that's what typically we cook with.

And then it's, when you have access to it here it's like well they use that instead what does that look like and is it does it look like block brock what is it called broccoli rob closer to broccoli rub yeah yeah very close to broccoli rub i don't know if it's the same if gylon is the same species if it is exact same thing as broccoli does it have the same sort of flavor it's mostly stalk still has that kind of bitterness to it um it's it's it's leafy as opposed to the florets and like that kind of stuff and there's some vegetables it's like bok choy bok choy is so delicious like how does how did bok choy never catch on to other cultures i think it's

it's demographical you know i think that it just can't grow it's hard to grow like your dish at your place the bok choy with mushrooms is fantastic. Yeah. It's so good. And it's a sleeper because most people – mushrooms is divisive. I think a lot of people see mushrooms and are like, I don't like mushrooms. But there's 900 types of mushrooms, right? There's a lot.

There it is. Yeah, it looks like broccoli rabe. Yeah. Or broccolini. I guess you would think of it as that too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, fortune cookies or sweet and sour pork. It is, I think, that the Chinese food had this, you know, where you get your salinity from soy sauce and you get sweetness from, you know, rock sugar or you add sour from vinegar and this kind of sweet and sour or spicy, salty, that kind of this type of blending of foods and it's like i think that when you make that connection and somebody else makes a dish something like that then you're like oh that has an asian type flavor because soy sauce tastes the same when it cooks in a certain way in high heat that type of stuff so you can invent a complete different dish and call it asian-ish you put soy sauce and

ginger and sesame seeds on a burger and it's like oh there's something asian about this thing and it's like yeah that's where things get weird, right? With like fusions. Right, right. Fusions are odd. Like fusion cuisine. I like the concept of fusion as an evolution of a dish as opposed to like just kind of shoving stuff together.

Right. You know, like there's no reason necessarily to make a Chinese lasagna and to try to make it one way or the other. Have you thought about it? You're saying that like you might have thought about it. I have thought about it. But it's more of like it's more of like it's it's it's like, well, what would you use for noodles? Well, Chinese people invented noodles.

Right. But I mean, so wide, flat rice noodles or something like that. But like we don't eat a lot of cheese. Chinese people or a lot of Asian people are naturally lactose intolerant. I think most people are naturally lactose intolerant. We're just shoving that delicious stuff down our faces. For sure. For sure.

It's worth it, though. It's worth it, I think, to me. I love some cheese. But at the end of the day, there's i mean i think that you should i like the idea of thinking if a if somebody got here met up married was in a community with some italian folks and then saw this and decided to use some chinese flavors and ingredients to do it but not just this chimera for no reason just to just force things together like the idea of you like i laugh a lot at the the asian chicken salad you know yeah and we're like why is this asian and then it's like

well we put mandarin oranges in it and wonton crisps and ginger you're like where'd that come from you think i don't know i think it was just marketing i think it's just somebody goes let's let's just market something exotic. What's crazy is how familiar it is. It is. It's such a familiar dish. It is. But it's like no Asian person I know had a grandparent that made that for them.

My grandmother never was like, let's make salad tonight and canned open of mandarin oranges and whipped together. Yeah, that's weird, right? Where something like that just pops up. Yeah, this spontaneous inspiration in this world and then Wendy starts selling it. And then someone, yeah, it becomes sort of... Part of the zeitgeist. Yeah, it just gets out there

and then everybody knows what a Chinese chicken salad is. Yeah, and I think it also comes from this kind of comfort level too. You know, I think that, like, there's certain really kind of safer things and you have to kind of ease into it. Some people are very weird about food. They're not very adventurous and they don't want to try new things. And especially there's like a lot of buyer's remorse for people where they're nervous about ordering something they don't like or anything like that. And so I think that when you said that.

Those people should stay home. Stay home. Stay home or just go to Gus's fried chicken. It's the same every time. But then for us, it's like as a business, we're like, well, let's let's give them something that's a little bit like, you know, we still have a fried rice on our menu. That's just me. If you want a chicken fried rice at Wuchow, you can. There's a lot of better things, you know. But if that's what you used to eating, then let's do it.

There might be better things, but sometimes not. Sometimes that's what you want. That's what you want. So I don't judge. Just a nice fried rice, a little bit of egg, a little bit of whatever. But Chinese fried rice for us, for the culture, is a leftover dish. Oh, so it's like you take some of the food that's leftover, you fry it up. Right, because

the trick to good fried rice at home is day-old rice. Oh. You have to use day-old rice. We cook rice and then put it back in the fridge for the next day to cook our fried rice. Because you want it to dry out so that when you cook it with all this extra

moisture and oil and soy sauce and everything like that it plumps back up to normal not mushy the next day so it makes sense so it really is so the intention is i've got all these little scraps and bits and leftover little bits of the barbecue that we did or the little chicken dish that we had and we have add an egg in there and have some old rice that we had from the night before cook it up again and then it's like a casserole it's like a it's like a leftover dish when you did wu chao what one of the things that i really like about it is that you have small dishes so you order a ton of them that's right you know i like that because you get a gang of different flavors at your place. What made you go in that direction?

I mean, that is the culture. In Chinese, when you say eat, in reality, the words that you literally say, which means to eat rice. So in Chinese culture, the food all hits the middle of the table, and we each have our bowl of rice. And the intention is to just grab a little bit of this and eat it with the rice and do the business, eat it with the rice. And that's kind of the thing. So, um, when you share all these different dishes, that's the intention. You always order six, seven different dishes. Like when we eat out as a family, it's like, we just order a

big table full of food and then we all have our own little rice bowl and we all just eat a little bit of everything. So that was a very pure level of cultural way that we culturally eat it's more like it's it's actually makes no sense for you and i to go either you mean jamie to go eat and say i'll get the you know i'll get the chicken you know the beef with broccoli whatever it is and then for you to say oh that sounds good i good. I'll have that also. You know, that, that philosophy doesn't exist in, in, in, in Chinese culture. It's like, what are we ordering for the table? Because we're all going to have rice. This is the dish that we want. If there's something that you want order for the table, I'll have some too. And so for me, it was very important to kind of do that. Matter of fact, Swift's even has that philosophy.

You know, I never liked that idea. I always, I'm the guy that when, if you and I were, we're all eating dinner and then you ordered the lamb chops and I was like, Oh, I was going to get that. Well, I get something else because I would like, let me, let's trade.

Let's, let's share some of this. I don't, you know, if I, that, that concept is very kind of Western as opposed to the kind of the Eastern way, which is,

we all kind of, it all hits the center of the table. I always found that so odd that if someone wants something and another person at the table orders it, that person won't order it now. Just fucking order it. Do you want the lamb chops? Order the lamb chops. We'll both have it. Yeah.

For me, it's just more of like, especially with new restaurants, older restaurants, sure, you eat what you want. But with new restaurants, I'm like, I want to try seven things on the menu. I want to try. I want to get a gamut of how this restaurant really is. And I can't obviously eat six different steaks. So if the six of us all get a different steak and we all each get a little bit of it, then at least we can all determine which one we really like at the end of the day. That might be like the most American style of restaurant is a steakhouse.

Yeah, a big slab of meat. The amount of meat that we eat in one sitting, yeah, nobody. I don't think very many other coaches do that. Unless like Argentina. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A. Yeah. The amount of meat that we eat in one sitting, yeah, nobody, I don't think very many other cultures do that. And that's like Argentina. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A few South American. Yeah, in Brazil, of course, they have the chujasquerias, which is amazing.

That's one of my favorite ways to eat because if you want to get really full in 15 minutes, you know. It's rapid fire. Yeah, if you go to like Fogo do Chão, you just sit down with those cards. It's a green on one side and red on the other. Just keep coming, keep coming with the food. It's also an amazing value, right? Because it's all you can eat.

I think for people like us. Yeah. You know, you take my sister there. She probably doesn't eat $48 worth of steak. Right, that's true. We probably go in there and make them lose some money. They also have great salad bars too, right? But don't you feel a little, do you feel a little guilty about filling up?

No. I have an uncle that went to, that when he goes to buffets, would just pick the most expensive thing and just eat nothing but that. Like if there was cocktail shrimp, he's like, I'm just going to eat two pounds of cocktail shrimp. Don't fill up on rice. Don't get rolls rice don't get rolls don't get any of this filler vegetables like why are we eating vegetables like we I paid for it I'm gonna make them get my money's worth it was form over function yeah over forms I think then you're you're a prisoner to your own frugality yeah I'm I'm there to enjoy food yeah so if I'm

going to the salad bar I'm looking for stuff that looks delicious. I'm looking for olives and cheese and peppers, you know. Yeah. And the skill that they do with the different – the picanha and the different – and it's rare that you get to do this Pepsi challenge with nine different cuts of meat. Right, right, right. I think that – I love watching when you sit there and you're cooking this elk and you knock it out perfectly. But it's like you are probably one of the few people that had the experience to sit there. And when you have, you can taste different parts of the same animal.

Mm-hmm. Of literally that same animal. Yeah. So you see that one animal, what the backstrap tastes like versus what the liver tastes like versus what the shank tastes like and stuff like that. Whereas when we're buying it from the store that came from six different cows probably yeah and the the other part of is you know for sure that you're dealing with a healthy animal it's right you know you're not like you know some animals have abscesses and all sorts of weird problems and they you know cut that part

out yeah you know who knows what's flowing through that animal's body yeah and we've talked about it earlier i think that there is a level of respect that comes from that i think there's a lot of people are kind of in denial of the process of harvesting an animal yeah we were talking before the podcast about some folks that get upset at your restaurant if you serve them a fish with the head on it which is you know crazy yeah and you just don't want to come to you don't want to look face to face with like the cruelty that is that we're hard you know that we are part of this top of the food chain rather than the bottom there is nothing more cruel than the fucking ocean the ocean is the

cruelest place in the world it's just constant screaming yeah it's just murder soup it's like a giant bowl of murder they're just all running around eating each other like what what percentage of ocean creatures eat other ocean creatures it's based strictly on size pretty much yeah it's like literally anything that's what is there's a saying there's always a bigger fish like there's like that that is in the ocean like you just you you are you are completely in the food chain you're in a highway of food chain yeah it's just a wild place in that regard that most of those things are eating other things that are alive. Yeah. Like most of them.

And we have to be, I think that that's even, again, even in our role as humans and stuff like that, that's, we should come to grips with that. I think there's some respect to that. I think that there is something that's why. I remember at Swift's we used to get chickens from this local farm kind of right outside of San Antonio. And my chef came up with a fried chicken dish that really kind of took off. And I remember one time it was sold so many we had to order up in the middle of the week. We're like, hey, we need some more chickens.

And they're like, we're out. What do you mean? Until when? Until these chicks become chickens. We don't have any more chickens. It's a finite resource. And it's like the concept of like, it should be a finite resource.

We shouldn't have an unlimited right amount of chicken like you should run out of stuff like that's that's the thing do you know that there's a wing shortage right now have you noticed that is there yeah there's apparently i don't know the exact reasoning for it but like wing stop is now called they have thigh stop because they're doing fried thighs now with why are there more thighs than there are wings well how many wings you sit down in a sitting how many wings do you eat and in a sitting? How many wings do you eat? And how many thighs would you eat? It's just the amount of people using it.

Right. And so all of a sudden, a bird still has only two of each. But if I ate 20 wings in a sitting, I just had 10 birds worth of wings. And what have they been doing with the thighs all this time? Well, other fried chicken restaurants and whatever it is. And so it was for whatever reason, there's this crazy wing shortage. It is kind of crazy that there's parts of the chicken that merit a whole restaurant. Right?

Yeah. There's no chicken neck restaurants. There should be. Chicken necks are dope. Chicken necks are good. But there are chicken wing. But meanwhile, I got news for you. Thighs are better. Chicken eggs are good. Yeah. But there are chicken wing. But meanwhile, I got news for you. Thighs are better.

Yeah. They're meatier. But there's something to be said about ratio. There's something to be said about the crisp to whatever, the ease of a handle and that kind of, you know, there's a reason for it. I don't necessarily, you know, it's a uh i don't think that there's a better or worse i think that it's again it's just something that we just have grown accustomed to wings are also one of the rare things that are mostly spicy like right it's like one of the especially when it comes to american foods it's one of the rare foods that most of the time people get them spicy yeah

like buffalo wings yeah you know and i think that that's one of the things i was talking about how where um i think that there is something to be said about when the if you're the first person which is rare to be i think in this day and age it's like you know how it's like really hard to invent stuff now i feel like because we've just invented so much and so the idea like there's um there's a Japanese dish called sukemen, which is a type of ramen. It's like a dipping ramen where you take the, you have the sauce, the broth over here, and then you actually dip the noodles separate from the broth and you eat. It's almost like a French dip kind of process. It's like a mix between like soba noodles and ramen.

So it's like a noodle with no broth at all? Right. And then you have a really concentrated ramen broth. And then you dip it before you eat. And then you eat it. And so you think about it. When I had it, being ignorant of the invention of it, you'd think that, wow, this was like soba noodles and people have been doing it for hundreds of years. The dude that invented that dish is alive. His shop is in Japan right now.

It's like in the 70s or something. It's just weird that somebody could invent, like if you just walked and met the guy who decided to sell chicken wings from the crown, the anchor pub, whatever, the anchor pub in Buffalo. Who is the guy that invented the Buffalo wing? I think it's the anchor pub in Buffalo.

I wonder how the fuck that came about. Because it's a very distinctive flavor. Yeah. Like Buffalo sauce. Frank's Red Hot and Butter. Yeah. Yeah. Is that what it is?

Yeah. That's all it is? Classically, yeah. Frank's Red Hot and Butter. Yeah, 1964. Yeah. It's like within a lifetime. Like, you know?

Yeah. It's just wild to think like, oh, yeah, I know the guy. He invented Buffalo. And then the celery people got involved and said, listen, there's a little place on the table for us. I got my friends, the carrots. Come on. We got to pretend we're eating healthy here.

Yes. Let me take down 48 fried chickens. But it is a good combo, right? The celery and the carrots are nice with the buffalo wing, right? Yeah. It works. And it's also an excuse to consume a lot of ranch and blue cheese. You know, it's blue cheese with wings or go fuck your mother.

Do you know that? I do know that. Yeah. You got to ask Joey Diaz. Let me write that down. He has a t-shirt. It's a famous Joey Diaz quote. Yeah.

He fucking classically hates ranch. Yeah. I think. But it's just, you know, to calm the spice down, I think. Ranch? I think it does. Yeah. But blue cheese tastes better. I do. I think. Ranch? I think it does. Yeah, but blue cheese tastes better. I do.

I agree. I'm a blue cheese guy. You don't think so? Jamie's from Ohio. Yeah. Those fucking Midwestern people, bro. Does a ranch have dairy? A ranch on everything.

But ranch is dairy. That's what I'm saying. I know, I know, but it's like mold, though. It's not good. It's not mold. It's delicious. How dare you? Blue cheese is mold. Son of a bitch. Listen mold though. It's not like, it's not good. Not, it's not mold. It's delicious. How dare you? Blue cheese is mold.

Son of a bitch. Listen to him. It stinks. What? Who are you? What have you done with Jamie? But yeah, but that's it. But it's, we're talking about is that there's pure, there's, food is weird in that way.

I think that people have, there's purists out there that say this is, like I said, I don't care if you like it this way or not. Right. This is the way it's supposed to be. Right. There's people that get angry if you use a steak sauce. Yeah. Or people who insist that hot dogs are not meant to be eaten with ketchup.

Yeah, that's a weird one. Because hot dogs with ketchup on them are pretty fucking good. Like, I'm a classic guy. I like a dark, spicy mustard, and I like sauerkraut. Right. That combo with a real hot dog is pretty fucking good, but something wrong with a little ketchup on a hot dog. Tastes good. And that's the judgment that comes is a very strange thing to me, you know, but I, I'm one of

those people that I, I try to experience it from both ways. I wanna say, let me try it how you wanna have it, how you wanna serve it, and then once I've done that, it's like, then, you know, no holds barred. I can do whatever you want. There's the opposite contention thing, the mustard on the hamburger. A lot of people get upset at that.

Really? They do not like the mustard on the hamburger. Comes an issue. It is one of those things that i don't i mean i think if you want to get deep with it it's an interesting phenomenon that happens where where what like don't the one is saying that people don't yuck my yum right i've never heard that one before but don't don't use it you know and it's like that's the thing. It's like, I don't understand that. That we do that a lot as a society. We yuck each other's yum in a very weird way,

in a very consistent and broad way where you can go up to somebody and if somebody's wearing stripes and polka dots and you sit there and go, what are you doing? You know, whatever it is. And you're like, why does it matter to you? It's like, you know, is it what Jay-Z said? That is like what you eat don't make me shit. You know, and it's like, why does it matter to you? Yeah. It's like, you know, is it what Jay-Z said that?

It's like, what you eat don't make me shit. You know, and it's like- I think that's R. Kelly. Is that R. Kelly? Yeah. Yeah. What they eat don't make us shit, real talk. Maybe. It might be R. Kelly.

Isn't it? Real talk. Yeah, you might be right. But the idea is, but that's the concept. It's like, I don't understand that. Like, you know i think especially chefs and they get people get really offended by it you get a steak and you want to put ketchup on it it's like yeah you know it's a people take offense to it i'm just like at the

end i take offense to that if i cook steak at home my kids want to use ketchup i'm like oh my god i just look at the sky yeah look away look away let them do it let him do it it's to me it's there is a concept i do get a little bit perturbed if somebody orders a well-done steak that's gross because to me i'm like you just don't like steak i think i think at the end of the day like we get get a beef short rib get a braised short rib that's something for 10 hours. Some people like that crispy outside, though. You could get that without cooking to July. I agree. Listen. Jay-Z 2001. Oh.

Far from the city. Well, when was Real Talk? Real Talk, I think, was after that. So R. Kelly ripped off Jay-Z. Is that what they're saying here? There's lots of people saying it, but probably because Jay-Z said it. Well, let's go to Google R. Kelly Real Talk. When did that come out?

Because that's where I know it from. He does say it in that. Right. 2007. Oh, how dare R. Kelly. God, he just adds on to his... Yes, his crimes. His crimes.

Stole from Jay-Z. How dare he? Yeah. But, you know, I think that it is that kind of concept at the restaurants and stuff it's still at the end of the day I try to remember I'm in a hospitality industry I'm there to make you comfortable that's what you want it is what you want but there's some other combos that are interesting right like uh fish and chips has to have tartar sauce but occasionally a little

vinegar malt vinegar yeah yeah you know like there's like very specific that's a very specific It has to have tartar sauce, but occasionally a little vinegar. Malt vinegar. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like there's like very specific. That's a very specific, narrow window. And a very strange condiment because you don't sprinkle vinegar on very many things. On anything. I mean, oil and vinegar maybe. Yeah, on salad. Yeah. But some people like with fries.

That's an English thing. It's an English thing. They like it. Well, they went to war over salt. Right. You know? Right. They still remember that shit.

Yeah. And it's like that's kind of one of those things. You know how good, like you know how like whack your food must be to add vinegar as the first, like your first choice and it just makes it better. But I love. But fries with vinegar are pretty goddamn good. It's really good and unexpected. I would have never done it. And so is fish and chips. Yeah. Fish and chips with vinegar are pretty goddamn good. It's really good and unexpected. I would have never done it.

And so is fish and chips. Fish and chips with vinegar are pretty good. I love thinking about origin of food like that. I always think about the first person that fried something. Like we think about, and you might know, and this is what I admire about you, that you've talked to so many people that you've like really have probably, you know, you have this wealth of, of experience. So like had to have been the first stuff before you started cooking, you had the harness fire.

So you just, you probably dried stuff first, right? Just in the wind. Yeah. They probably cut things thin and hung them from trees and stuff. So they weren't spoiled, right?

They do a lot of that in Mexico. Yeah. And a lot of the cultures, the longer range cultures. And then somehow we harnessed fire and then we started roasting stuff. And then boiling had to come after that because you had to have some sort of vessel to boil water, which has got to be fundamentally crazy to think of who could do that. Right. And then somebody accidentally tried to boil something in a bunch of rendered beef fat or something and realized it made shit crispy and

Mmm, right how mind-blowing Must have that been like imagine if you just lived your entire life and didn't have a french fry until you're 40 something years old like when was that invented like boiling things in oil and Then battering them first and then boiling them in oil to make a nice crispy outer layer well i mean potatoes will get crispy without battering and then somebody got really and started let's let's fry more stuff let's do let's throw other stuff in here and see you think potatoes were the first thing that people boiled i don't know i've never in in an oil like that you know potatoes they boiled in water i would think so but

i really think that i don't know if potatoes are difficult to again if you really look at it if you talk to somebody who who knows the the history of this kind of stuff i don't know the the growth the the trajectory of of agriculture as to when potatoes were even, you know, first grown. So I don't know, you know, who knows. But, yeah, there's just stuff like that. Like the first person accidentally made popcorn or something like that, you know, got real hot and then started walking out to a field after a fire and then found the whole field covered in.

Well, wild tubers. People have been eating wild tubers for a long time, just roots. Right. Right. And then they figured out, well, these roots are fat and juicy. Or like carrots. These are sweet and delicious. Would it be better to cook in oil than dirty water?

Yeah. Arguably. Because if they just had no clean source of water around, maybe it's like, what else can we cook stuff in? But that's probably why they started boiling water in the beginning. Realizing that people weren't dying as much

after you blew it first. A little mud and stuff would have been in there that they couldn't get out. Yeah, that you can't filter it out. Not the parasites, because they didn't know what it does. Yeah, like when did they figure out water filtration? Not recently. Yeah, recently.

Recently. I wonder, you know? Thursday. When did they figure out water filtration? Not recently. Yeah, recently. Not a hundred years. Recently. I wonder. Thursday. Because now they got it down to a lot of guys that go camping. They'll bring these water filter pumps. Yeah. And so they can pull up to a puddle and pump through this filtration.

Well, they have that straw. There's that life straw they're supposed to carry around that filter. It's amazing. I know what's even crazier the uv wands so you'll take like some water from a puddle like this and you have a uv wand and you just stir the uv light through the water for you know x amount of minutes and it kills everything the problem is it still tastes like cow piss or whatever the fuck you're actually drinking but you won't die it's a survival. But you won't die. It's a survival thing. Yeah.

It'll kill all the parasites. I mean, say what you will, I think that's one thing that this whole last couple years put in perspective is like we really, you know, we're living in a pretty magical time. Like it's really still the best it's ever been. Oh, it's incredible. I mean, even with the pandemic, look, when, when you, we think about how many people got really, really sick during this pandemic and, but survive through the magic of modern medicine and then learned at the end of it, like, wow, how valuable is my health? I'm going to start doing something. I'm going to start walking every day. I'm going to start

eating health. I mean, a lot of people went right back to eating bullshit. A lot of people, a lot of people got real close to death and they were real scared and they went right back to being fucking sloppy. And it's sad, but a lot of people did. A lot of people just started recognizing, you know what? I am more robust if I'm thinner, if I'm healthier, if I'm eating good food and I'm taking in nutrients and vitamins and I'm exercising on a regular basis. The quality of my life improves. I'm more resilient. And if something does happen, you bounce back far quicker. And if there's anything that we learned from this pandemic, it's that. It increases your odds at least. Oh my God, by a giant leap. I mean, there's all sorts of disputes about the numbers, but at least at one point in time, it was 78% of the people who were in the ICU with COVID were obese.

78% is a big fucking number, man. And it's also like, I think that psychologically speaking, I think that also it slowed us a lot down. I think there's a lot of stuff that takes having a flat tire to get some of these people to pull off to the side of the road for a second. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, just me last week. I was sick last week.

Yeah. And the first couple of days. Thank you. The first couple of days, all I thought about was like, okay, now I get a little break. Yeah. And then while I was having that little break, I was like, why do I live so crazy? Why am I jamming so many lives into one life? You know, because it's kind of what I'm doing.

I'm kind of jamming like multiple lives into a single life. Yeah. And it seems like that's the only way I'm legitimately satisfied, which is very odd. And I think it's part and parcel with your success, though. I think that you talk about the wherewithal to do that is also the wherewithal for you to do what you do. You know, I've got I have a lot of friends of mine that have come up to me over the years and have talked to me and asked wanted advice about opening up their own bar or whatever like that. But these guys also still sleep till three o'clock in the afternoon. I've had 10 meetings already.

Yeah. Like, what are you like? You're never going to do if you don't live that kind of if you don't have that drive. And I mean, I don't know how to get that for somebody. It's just like the opposite is true for fitness, for other people, like the people that get up at five o'clock in the morning, get a workout in like yourself. And I'm just like, if I don't like I can't complain about not being in this tip top shape if I don't have the wherewithal for me to kind of do that kind of stuff, to devote to that kind of thing. There's a very clear and easy method for developing that, though. You can do it.

And this is the way you do it. You write it down. Write everything down. Just write it down. Yeah. It seems so simple. Yeah. But if you just, and you don't need a lot.

You just say 30 minutes of cardio. Just write down 30 minutes of cardio at 9 a.m. or whatever, you know, depending upon obviously what time you have to work, you know, 7 a.m., whatever it is. So get up, do 30 minutes of cardio, and then you check that off the list. And you feel different once you've done that. But a lot of it is priority, you know? I think you just have to value that. Right, but I'm telling you, the physical act of writing something down and then checking it off the list is huge. I don't have to do that anymore for most things. It becomes a habit. 30 days or whatever, it's a development habit.

Because it's a rock solid habit with me now, but it's helped me in the past tremendously, especially when there's a lot of things on that list. And I know I've got to get those things done, but I could just fuck off and watch YouTube for an hour and then I'll miss, you know, two or three of those things that I'm supposed to be doing. But I think it's like, but like, again, slowing down, making that a priority in your life, you know, that's what actually ultimately I don't, it's like, we didn't know each other too much, but I've lost about 60 something pounds over this pandemic. Right. And a lot of it started from me realizing that I work too much. I don't have time to work out. It was all bullshit because when I didn't have anything to do, I still wasn't, you know, it was like, yeah, I woke up and I was like,

I didn't do anything today. I'm still not doing anything. And then you get a trainer. No. What ended up happening was I was starting to do conference calls. I was on conference calls for three hours a day. So I just put on earbuds and I started just roaming the neighborhood. And I found out that I was walking six miles a day. Oh, that's great. Just roaming the neighborhood. A friend of mine texted me yesterday and she said, I need to get a a uh a treadmill because uh you know i uh you know

i'm gaining all this queso weight since i moved to texas and and i said well go around ladybird lake it's beautiful it's fucking beautiful just and all these other people are running too for me it was that was the the conference call actually distracted me enough to not feel so monotonous. I think a treadmill is what I couldn't do. It was because I felt like a hamster. You can watch movies. Yeah. Your mind, the different ways that people's mind

works. For me, that was it. It was like the vitamin in the bologna for me. It was like this trick on how to do this. And then I literally woke up and I was like, where am I baloney for me it was like this trick i had to do this and then i literally woke up and i was like where am i because i'd be focused on this call and i realized i walked two and a half miles in one direction and then i was like i gotta walk two and a half miles back and so now my conference call is over so then i'd call another friend i'd call somebody else yeah and then i would just chat with him on that walk. But again, I never took enough.

I mean, it still took a couple hours, but I never took two hours to go on a walk. Right, but you doubled. You, like, multitasked. Doubled down. You got it down to that's the point. And walking is so good for you, too. Like, people think that you have to do something, like, incredibly rigorous to benefit your health, but you really don't. Like, just plain old left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.

Keep going. Real good for you. And then cooking. Cooking did a lot of it too. Yeah. Because a couple things. Number one, I don't know about you, but for me, I eat less when I cook the entire thing myself. Whether it's the work that it took into it or tasting it or looking at it all.

Like when I go to a restaurant, I'll overeat. But at home, after I cook my entire meal or whatever, the tendency is for me to eat less. It's just very – That's interesting. I wonder why. Yeah, I don't know. It might be a restaurant thing.

Maybe because I do it for a living. It's like don't get high on your own supply type thing. I don't know what it is. But it's just when I host people, when I serve, if you ever come to my house and I'll cook for 30 people or whatever it is, the tendency is for me, I might not even fix myself a plate after cooking for two and a half hours. I was like, I don't even want to look at it anymore. It's like, I just, I'm happy to serve everybody and be done with it. One thing I started doing differently over the pandemic is I started cooking over live wood over hardwood. That was a new thing that I started

doing. Cause, uh, I just was like, let me try this. Let me see what this is. I got one of those Argentine grills. Yeah, up in the raises and lowers. It's a company called Sunterra. Yeah. Sunterra. And it's got two levels, one on each side.

So you could raise up one. Is that where you cook all your elk and stuff? Yeah. Well, most of the time I use a Traeger. Right. Most of the time I use a pellet grill. And then I'll either sear it at the end in a cast iron pan or I'll do it on that grill. I mean, your temperature control is down.

I got it down. It's down, for sure. And it's hard because it's so lean. Yeah. It's very difficult. You're cheating when you do like a ribeye beef with all this fat in it. Right. It's a little easier.

It's a little easier. But when you're cooking like Nilgai, it's like. Yeah. Nilgai is a good example, right? The whole key is a meat thermometer. I mean, you can do it by feel. Don't be proud. Don't be a hero.

Yeah. Don't be a hero. Just get in there. This bullshit, you know, like stuff. Well, you can do that. I think that's better with steak, with a ribeye. I think you get a better understanding of it. With that really lean meat, like your

fuck-up error. And the resting time. The room for fuck-up is very small. What I like to do is I cook a lot of it and then that's what I'll eat for the next few days because I'm always so busy. What I'll do is I'll get my morning workout in and then I'll have

cold elk with hot sauce. That's what I like. I like like habanero sauce and I dip it in the habanero sauce and I eat cold elk. I got a friend of mine just started a hot sauce thing over the pandemic too. Oh yeah? I got to give you some of the samples. Okay. Yeah, it's real good stuff. But yeah, I mean, I think that there's an interesting

thing that happens. I think there's this kind of misconception, I think, when, I think there was a, there's this kind of misconception, I think, of busyness being better and more successful and all this other stuff. And I think that, I think there is a, there's something also equally, and again, the beauty is in the balance. I think that there's sedentary that's damaging also. We're not trying to say that we should. But there's also something damaging about burning yourself out.

Yeah, that's not good. I'm going to give a shout out to this hot sauce that I've been into lately. Oh, my goodness. I have a taste for hot sauce. Yellowbird. I like it strong. And there's this company, Señor Lechuga Hot Sauce. It's S-C-N-O-R-L-E-C-H-U-G-A Hot Sauce on Instagram.

Would you ever do hot ones? They make it with Reapers, with Carolina Reapers, so it's got a real kick. But do you like the endorphin rush from the pain? I love it. Would you do the hot wings show? No, I think it's a dumb way to have a conversation. I don't understand it.

I think the understanding is the uncomfortableness of it. I think that, because I remember watching, I like the show. And I think what I liked about it, early on especially, I think now people power through it. But I think seeing people in duress try to answer questions. I think that there's something about it that has a little bit of Yeah, it's like I guess I mean I guess in a way it'd be like Talking to somebody while you're drowning like if you if you're like would like make somebody tread water and have a conversation I like Conversations like a real conversation where people are comfortable and I want

them to explore their ideas. I don't want them to be distracted. Copy. You know, it's to me, it's a gimmick. And it's not that it's a bad show. It's a good show. It's really, and he does a great job. It's not a knock on the show. I'm not interested. Yeah, I can feel it. I like conversations. When I talk

to someone. Enjoy the food. Compartmentalize that. I want people to be comfortable when I talk to them food yeah compartmentalize I want people to be comfortable when I talk to them and I want them to explore these ideas and I don't want like a band playing behind them and fucking a tuba in their ear yeah I mean and I don't want their mouth to be on fire when they're talking about their childhood yeah you know I mean yeah it's like it's not that it's a bad idea it's a it's a great idea for a show and it's obviously very successful and he does a great job it's not it is definitely a bad idea. It's a great idea for a show, and it's obviously very successful, and he does a great job. It's not a knock-on.

It is definitely a bit of a gimmick. I'm not interested. That's the shit right there. Senor Lechuga. Oh, look. He's got my fucking endorsement. That's so hot. That one's habanero, onions, and reapers.

You know you're in trouble when the habanero is the light spice on that. It's got a fucking kick. But there's some, I'll tell you, at Wuchai we do a lot of Shichuan food, which is very spicy. Yes. But there is a skill to that too because you also want it to have flavor. Right, right. So to figure out that balance, like a good jerk seasoning or something like that, it's like, man, you want to be able to taste the pimento and taste the smoke and taste the – you can't just light people up for no reason.

It's like there's got to be some depth to it, and I like that layers of that kind of stuff. Hot sauce is also – and spice and kick is also very subjective. There's like – my wife can't take any of it. She's not a hot sauce person at all. Bell pepper is spicy to them. But my children, like they're split down the middle. Like my youngest will fuck up some hot sauce. Like sometimes I'll, like she tried the Reaper sauce.

She likes the Reaper sauce. I'm like, wow, 11. And she's getting after it with the Reaper sauce. I can take certain types of, I realize that culturally different spices. I can take certain types of, I realize that culturally different spices. Like I can take the southwestern, these type of smoky type hot, jalapeno hot, more than I can take like Thai. Oh, interesting. And Asian spices, like that Thai bird, that type of sharp, like that kind of sauce. The slow burn sauce, I can deal with.

But the kind of stuff that I feel like is stabbing me in the throat. I it all it's awesome good to know i love it all but i really love mexican spice yeah i love a hot spicy carne asada taco yeah with a lot of kick for sure if i had like one food it might be mexican like if i really had to choose like one food for because there's some like Mexican comfort food like tacos and burritos and quesadillas. Like there's something about Mexican with the spices and the use of the cheeses and the God damn they make some good food. I think all comfort foods to me is my way to go. I think every culture is comfort food. Food gives me a lot of comfort. And so I think that there's something for me that you can taste that.

Like my grandmother never made chicken noodle soup for me growing up, obviously, old Chinese woman. But it comforts me. I don't know if it's watching cartoons. Chicken noodle soup is just a fantastic array of flavors, though. Yeah, with thyme and peppercorn and all that. Did you ever go to Jerry's Famous Deli in California? Mm-mm. Man, a lot of them went under now during the pandemic and even before the pandemic.

I think there was one in Woodland Hills I used to go to. Coming home from the comedy store all the time, I would get a pastrami Reuben and a bowl of chicken noodle soup. My God, I would look forward to that. There's something about a really well done chicken noodle soup with a little pepper and a little Tabasco in it. And I think that that's what it is. I think that universally speaking, there's something with like,'s especially foods, I think, that take time that that there is some comfort there. And it's just something like that. It's it's marination or barbecuing or slow roasting or whatever it is. There's that that's like there is the idea of fast food out of convenience. But that's not it's weirdly, you know know i don't think it's as comforting now some

people might argue and sit there and say mcdonald's is comforting as hell because but i think that's the nostalgic stuff that talks to you about is saying grow up and it goes back to somewhere in your brain that brings you up to making you feel like a kid again but there might be just the sugar but it's like but at the end of the day i think that when you have a culture that makes a soup that takes eight hours and or spaghetti sauce or a some sort of roast that took all day or you know a pit pig roasted something that took all day that translates into a comfort those flavors really kind of pinpoint something i think yeah there's probably something also where you're aware of the effort that's involved in creating a dish like that yeah i think so gives you but I know a lot of people that are food for fuel you know and I know no knock to them but I guess I don't understand that

like to me yeah those are you know physical freaks those people that are just like really into fitness no I know a lot of people who are who are on who are unhealthy but still have this mindset that is like I just need to eat so I don't care it doesn't they don't enjoy the food it's like they do but not People who are unhealthy but still have this mindset that is like, I just need to eat. So I don't care. They don't enjoy the food. It's like they do, but not really. Do you wonder what they taste?

Yes. That's exactly the concept. That's what is one of the philosophical things that always blows my mind is like the idea of like, I wonder, just like you can't, I can't tell what color you're seeing. Right. Or like people who are really into fish. I mean, the band. You know what I mean? It's like, what color you're seeing. Right. Or like people who are really into fish. I mean, the band. You know what I mean? It's like, what are you hearing?

You hear something different than me. Right. And I feel that way about spicy food, too. I wonder. Spicy food, to me, is exciting. I mean, perfect example is I think it blew my mind when somebody told me that cilantro tastes different to some folks. Yes. Great example. It's a scientific difference.

It tastes like soap to some folks. Some folks. And I'm like, yeah, if I had a mouthful of dial soap, I probably wouldn't want to eat it. Yeah, that's a great example. So how do I know that mustard doesn't taste like that to you? Right. It's clear that it does.

It's with everything in life, with fashion, with the style of cars that people like. Like, what are you seeing when you see a yellow car? I see a car that somebody should have

painted a different color. Right. But some people are like, oh, look at that. Yeah. Look at that mustard-colored car. Yeah.

For sure. Maybe they really like mustard. But it's weird. But yeah, it is. But that goes back to this whole thing also of the, so whatever you enjoy, what makes you happy.

Yeah. You know, it's weird that we have such an aversion towards what makes other people happy. We do. Well, we are cowards and we want people to like only what we like. Right. Or we want more of what we like. And there's a lot of people who think that. I think there's a lot of people that think that happiness is finite.

That if you get too much, you're taking it from me. Like that you're taking more than your share, almost. I feel like when you wake up one day and you see somebody happy, and if you're not happy, you almost feel like, oh, this person's hogging all the happy. Really? I think there's people who live that way. Otherwise, how do you wake up and see somebody happy

and then realize that, you know what? Because you're a cunt. Maybe, yeah. Maybe. But what is that? Where's that from? Where's that come from? Bitter, unhappy people that don't realize

that part of the reason that they're unhappy is their attitude. Yeah. You know, your attitude can dictate a lot. It's literally the way you set up your interactions. Yeah. Like the way you think about things. And for some people, they're just selfish and they don't want other people to be happy. And I think that we talk about it.

Also, we, we, we touched on it offline too, is that we, without this interaction, social media, like you and I sitting down and having conversation right now,

like I can see your reactions and so much of that communication is that way yeah but after this is done there's gonna be a lot of people that just lob comments at us that we don't know we don't look at their face they don't see us writing it or if we read it or not they don't care i saw that with so when when i got sick in january with dave and them, and the amount of people, the comments that were – I had to turn off my comments just because my phone was like draining from battery. I don't even know how you live – how people at your level of reach live when you have 12 million comments or whatever it is. But it's just kind of like these are real humans on Earth. Unless you think that they're bots, unless they're really like robots out there

just making weird-ass comments. But there's somebody out there who took their phone and took a moment, saw something and decided to just say something, some hateful shit. And it's like, they would never say that to somebody to their face.

No, they wouldn't. But it's a terrible way to communicate. It's just, it's not human. It's not a human way. And it's also the idea that you actually can reach another human with these callous thoughts like you see a sick person and go fuck him fuck all of them i hope they die like they don't even mean that right like most of the time when people are saying that they're just talking they're just carelessly talking and

they're just doing it in a public forum. But it's your choice as to whether or not you interact with that and read it. Right. And I just, it's made my life infinitely better by not reading it. Occasionally things get through to me, like someone will tell me about, like, you know, CNN lying about me or something like that. I'm like, what? Really?

And then I have to look at them. I'm like, that's hilarious. That's a skill. But I don't yeah, it's it's it's a it's a discipline like I've developed a discipline and that discipline is to Treat people as nicely as possible Interact with people in as pleasant a way as possible as friendly way as possible work at it Like it's a thing that I work at. I put effort to be nice to people and then I'm not taking in any of that negative shit. I'm not, I'm not reading from people that

I don't know, reading from a bunch of sloppy, lazy thinkers who are just shitty online. There's so many of those people and there's so many people that are addicted to other people's reactions online. I express myself so often because of the podcast and I'm overwhelmed by the amount of feedback that comes my way. So I don't have any desire to express myself in any extra ways. But there's a lot of people out there that are just addicted to likes and comments and interacting with people in this weird sort of shallow peripheral way, this surface way. It's a very unhealthy way of spending your time interacting with people. And occasionally it bleeds off into real life. And you see people treat people and talk to people in real

life the way they do online and it's rude and it's awful and you see it and it's just like it's jarring yeah i was saying as people went back out into public after being locked down for a little bit i mean people have gone feral as some of some of you some people have really kind of yeah i mean that or people are already having difficulty communicating and then forcing that kind of isolation for a little bit coming out. It is very, it's difficult. You know, I mean, I'll say 100%, like even when you asked me to come talk and it was like, you know, I've got, I was like, what are we going to talk about? Imposter syndrome? Like, I feel like, what are we going to talk about, imposter syndrome? I feel like, what am I doing here? There's a part of me that says, what do I have to contribute?

Because for me, there is a humility that comes from that I think that a lot of people just don't have. Because these people have given everybody a voice. Everyone has this voice. And you're allowed to just express yourself. And it's very equal. Say what you will will but everyone is hoping for some level of recognition

especially someone like yourself that has a platform so someone's if I message something jarring enough then maybe a bunch of people will see it also I think that there's something there about saying that it's like this kind of remora type level of what I like in talking to a person like yourself

is that you're a person that hasn't sought out attention. You're just an artist who makes food. You know, you just make restaurants and you serve people and you give them a great culinary experience and a great environment. That's what I like. I like that you're just an that's what I like I like

that you're just an artist and that I like to talk to people that make great food chefs are some of my favorite people to talk to really are I love for me it's even more it goes further I think than that is I really like taking care of people yeah no I know you do well that was the thing that I got out of you bringing all this different food when we would do the shows at Stubbs, like, what has CK brought today? And it was all kinds of different food that you would bring by. Right. And it's just.

You even brought plant-based burgers once. Yeah. I forgive you for that. Right. Well, it was in addition to regular burgers. Okay. I tried them. Yeah.

I was like, what is this nonsense? How many vegetables had to die for this? You're eating the food's food. You're eating the food of the food. It's like people keep saying, oh, you can't taste the difference. Well, go to a doctor. Go to a doctor if you can't

taste the difference. And that's also the thing is that is the conversation that says that you can lean into... I don't like apologetic food. I don't like to sit there and say, That is the conversation that says that. You can lean into, I don't like apologetic food. I don't like to sit there and say, why make it taste the same? Right. Just enjoy a vegetable.

Exactly. If you want to eat vegetarian and just eat vegetables, there's some delicious dishes. I love Indian food. There was a vegetarian Indian food that I used to go to in California that was near my house that was amazing. It was this place that had all these amazing flavors and curries and all this spice, and it was all vegetarian. It was great, but they weren't pretending it was chicken or fake beef or anything stupid. It was just traditional vegetarian Indian cuisine, and it was really good. I would seek it out. I would go there all the time.

I really enjoy that aspect of restaurants and stuff too, is the people who are very, who just really love it. Yeah. That's a big difference. I think there's a difference between somebody leaning into a trend to make money versus somebody who has something to say. I think that restaurants, to me, that was the hard part about this.

I'll give you an example. The root of hospitality, the people who are the best at it, I think we all have this need to serve and to take care of people. Like when the big freeze happened, even zoom back before that, right when we all shut down in March, a lot of us got together. We're all panicking, texting each other. He was saying, what are we going to do? When are we going to reopen again?

Like how all of us, we had a zoom call with 50 restaurant owners that were like, are we done? We dead in the water kind of thing. Right. But then one of the conversations was at the end of that meeting was, what are we going to do with thousands of dollars of product that we're just going to go to, to go to waste. And so a lot of it, we just like, well, we're going to send it home with a lot of our employees that lost their job. We're going to cook up a bunch of it to anybody who

lost their job in the community to come and get free, come get the food from us. So we don't go to waste. We'll go send it out and send it out into the community and feed our community. I think the best of us all openly did that, seeing major restaurants to the food trucks. We all did the same thing. I think it also made people aware that food is a finite resource. And then we are vulnerable. We don't feel like we're vulnerable because you can just go to this place and buy that food or that place and buy that food. But at the end of the day, there's no guarantees here. And if we have to go back to hunting and gathering, a lot of people could be in a bad way.

This is dangerous. But I'll tell you, the one thing that also, I think, put in perspective a lot of people, as I hope, is I had a couple friends of mine that were panicking about and then would look in their pantry or whatever. It was like, I don't know what. I'm like, you have nine months worth of food. Like you're not, you know what I mean?

Like that was a thing where it's like, why are these people scrambling? Because we're just so used. And again, this is conversation of, we are living in a great time for a lot of people. I mean, if you just zoom back a little bit, like I get individually, we all have our issues, but it's like, man, we are living in a time of abundance. You know, like I get individually, we all have our issues, but it's like,

man, we are living in a time of abundance, you know? Like when, when this first thing went down, first thing I just, I opened up to my cab or my cabinet and I was like, all right,

I've got a 25 pound bag of rice. That'll last a while. I'm good. I'm not going to starve. I might not be happy, but I'll eat this forever for, for months. I was keeping an eye on the deer in my neighborhood.

Ordinarily, they're beautiful. I like looking at them like, hey, guys, how you doing? But I was like, hmm, let me pay attention to which way you travel. Yeah, some squirrels. I might have to whack you. But, yeah, that's the level I think of. I hope that people are starting to realize that too. It's weird.

And I think that that stressed people out a little bit you know when we're out of toilet paper like people are like what in the world it's like right it is weird to be out of something it's weird for us to show up to a store and something to be out of it because we're just used to be able to getting anything we're used to getting tomatoes 12 months a year when the tomatoes don't grow 12 months a year you know it's interesting if you stop and think about how many people rely on fast food for a large percentage of their meals, if that was eliminated, if you cut out all the Chick-fil-A

and McDonald's and Jack in the Box and all that stuff, if like that was off the menu, like I wonder how different people's lives would be and how differently they would think about food because for so many people, hungry means I'm going to pull into this drive-thru and I'm going to order and then in five minutes, I'm going to be eating a sandwich. That's right. So if that wasn't available and you had to really think about food in terms of nourishment and then preparation and like if there was no fast food. Imagine if there's a food supply. It's not a problem, but there's no more restaurants. Right.

Like everyone has to cook their own food. People are like, what? Yeah. Like how many people rely on other folks to cook their food for whether it's fast food or restaurants, a large percentage of their meals. Yeah. a large percentage of their meals. Yeah. And I think that there's also something to be said about the care of cooking yourself,

the sitting around a table, sharing a meal with something. These are things that I valued a lot. Having a restaurant was recognizing that aspect. Because our family celebrated, we mourned, we, you know, had difficult conversations around food. It was all, that was the thing around some food. And so you people come into town, we'd bring them, it's always about food. Everything is about food. And so that was my upbringing. And so I recognized that. I remember one of the crowning moments in my, like happy moments in my restaurant career was I remember this family brought in their son for freshman orientation.

And then four years later brought him in for the graduation dinner. I remember watching this kid like, oh, my God, it's been four years. Wow. Graduated like, holy shit. And then the honor for me to sit there and say that you chose to come back. And he said this is one of his favorite restaurants. He wanted to kind of bookend his experience here in Austin. And it was really something that really touched me in that way. You know, more so than the kind of person who has a million dollars in their bank and just can eat wherever they want and just spend money. It's like, no, it's like this person really enjoyed what we're doing. eat wherever they want and just spend money.

It's like, no, it's like this person really enjoyed what we're doing. It's got to be cool when you're there on like a busy Saturday night and you're looking out at this restaurant. All these people having a great time and you are providing them meals. I say it's probably the closest, and I think that's why I relate to entertainers, musicians, because I think the same thing when everyone's laughing at something that you said or singing along to the music that you wrote you know like and and that's one of the things i think i related because i think the creative process to doing all that other stuff

um is very similar to cooking you know i think that the reason why I relate to musicians in that way also is the recognition of being able to kind of pull from this database of knowledge of what this is supposed to sound like and that and realizing that these three things sound good together, these three things taste together. I had a chance to watch one of my friends who's a producer produce a track, and he was like playing this track, and then he all of a sudden was like, oh, and he reached in his bag and got a flash drive and put it in and pulled the sound, this little sound, whatever it is, and put it in there and slowed we're cooking something and we're tasting it and then he's like lemons we need lemon zest right not lemon juice not lemon segments not lime this he just been able to pull from this palette out of the ether and said that this dish would be good with some lemon zest and then that the best chefs are able to do that if you watch like master chef and these amazing, when they're blind tasting those 60 ingredients and they can be like hoisin, sesame oil, pepper, white pepper, Szechuan peppercorns, that's a habanero. Nope, that's Serrano. It's greener. You know, whatever it is.

And to be able to be able to have that on demand, you know, and again, every art, every entertainer has that palette. You as a comedian have that palette. You know what's funny and what's not funny, whether you know scientifically why, but you know the timing of it all. And hanging out with people who do this for a living, I see the creative process, and it's so fascinating to me. Because I think if you go and watch a show,

it sounds amazing that it feels like it's the first time you've ever said those words. But after you watch 10 in a row, I start to see like little nuances that you're like, well, this hit better when I said it this way. And I emphasize this word instead of that word. And that kind of stuff was what made me come back day after day to watch it over and over again. Because I was like, man, this is fucking fascinating to see the psychology behind that or as working through jokes that might have started off when we're like, man, that joke didn't work. But by the end of it was like fucking. It's like a curing process in a lot of ways.

Oh, it's awesome. There's this weird trial and error and then there's so many different variables that come into play, like your own attitude, whether you approach a subject with bemusement or anger or you're laughing at it or you're furious at it, and it varies. And it's just, and it also, there's this weird thing that happens with the crowd where you have to be completely connected to what you're talking about. Yeah. And if you're not, they know. Yeah, we have, and especially now, I think we have a really in-tune bullshit meter, you know? Yeah. And so when you're pandering, people can tell. Yeah, bullshit has never been more obvious.

Right. But never been more prevalent. Yeah. You prevalent. Yeah. You know, and people this is the first time in my life that I can recall a general distrust of the news is the norm. You know, and that's it's so funny you say that because we're talking we're talking the other day amongst our friends. We're saying a lot of this stems from a general distrust of everything. And I think a lot of it is like if we really of pinpoint, again, I'm simplifying things for sure, but the biggest problem I think we have right now is confirmation bias. There's a lot of that.

In the world, because education never was able to go backwards like this. It used to be, for every other generation, I think, you got a bunch of data and then you drew a conclusion from that data. That's how you had to do it. Now we're able to draw a conclusion and then go search for data. Right. And then there's people willing to lie to you because they're in the same tribe as you and they want that confirmation bias to be cemented into your mind. And it is the hardest thing because it's like they do these psychological studies, like go outside and look for red cars. And you're going to think that there's nothing but red cars on the street.

I mean, you really you have this opportunity to do that. And as technology has this access to it, to to be able to make something look very official and very real, it's very difficult to have that as opposed to and this is why again someone like having this type of platform and you able to talk to anybody and everyone i mean it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people because you're just talking to people and then it's like well why are you having this conversation with this person that doesn't, that I don't agree with? And it's like, well, I had a conversation with the person that you do agree with yesterday and you didn't say shit about that person. Like, why are, why are we, or why are you not mad that we're spreading that person? You know,

it's like, it's kind of like this interesting thing when you have this platform that allows you to do that. And I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that where it's something that i i think that is very it's very needed it's very needed it's very needed and the people that are avoiding it they're just they're avoiding these uncomfortable moments where they might agree with someone that they have this uh ideological rift with, whether the person's on the right or the person's on the left, the person is a this or a that. It's dumb.

It's a really dumb way to communicate. I'm curious as to why people think and believe things and the way they communicate and why they live their life a certain way and why they have these very rock-sol solid morals or ethics or why they don't. I'm curious. Yeah. But that's why I did this in the first place. I've always been a person who's interested in talking to people because I'm not exactly

sure why I think the way I think sometimes. I want to hear the way other people think. And through that, you learn a lot about yourself, like some, and then you also pick up things that you admire about the way other people approach life. And you apply those to yourself, to your life and to the way that you interact with other people and life itself. Yeah. I think anything that you practice, you get good at. And I think that we're out of practice from that. I think that you get into these echo chambers very easily. Well, that's a real problem with social media. You tend to gravitate towards people that agree with you. Of course, it feels good to have a bunch of people in the same room,

patting you on the back and telling you how smart you are, how good, how much we agree with each other. But, you know, I think that there was a, there's a real need to sit here and, and, and invite someone. I was that kind of of person i was the guy that when somebody came and knocked on my door to try to spread the whatever gospel there was at that moment whatever religion or whatever it was my come on in because i'm like you you say you have the truth i thought i was being told the truth in church every sunday So you got it. Sit down and tell me what you got. You know, I was like fascinated. I mean, what drives you to come out into Houston, 110 degrees on a bike?

Right. To come spread this word. Like you really believe this. Or they're just delusional. Whatever. Either way. But that's to me to sit there and say that I'm going to not listen to this person. The difference is that you're having that conversation one-on-one.

What people get upset about is that I'm having that conversation and millions of people are listening. Right. And so that conversation could potentially influence millions of people to think differently than the way they think. The other thing is they think that other people are dumber than them. It's an arrogance. There's a real strong arrogance because they feel like if I'm talking to someone who believes that the earth is hollow and that aliens live inside of it and they're playing with our minds through fucking radio waves or whatever.

The people that think that that's dangerous, the reason why they think it's dangerous is not because it's dangerous to them. They think it's nonsense. The reason why they think it's dangerous is not because it's dangerous to them. They think it's nonsense. They think it's dangerous because they think some people are gullible and stupid, and those people are going to be easily influenced by that. And I find that to be a very strange argument, and it's a very arrogant argument because they're only looking at it in one way. But the problem with even even me saying this though is that there's real evidence

that it is dangerous right right right right like cap the Capitol riots yes January 6th these fucking dumb have you seen that um HBO series the into the storm yes you yeah yeah I just started i just started yes what episode you on uh no i did literally like last week oh but so you just started just one okay because i want to know who you think q is oh okay all right yeah we'll talk by the end it's pretty obvious um but okay that is a good example of a bunch of people that are kind of aimless and this secret information will eventually change the world. And there's a weird desire that people have to be a part of that. And they get overwhelmed by it.

And it becomes their whole life. And that's a big part of what that show is about. A big part of that docuseries, a big part of that docu-series which i really really enjoyed is psychology it's about the psychology of hidden truths the psychology of people trying to you know right the wrongs and and trying to think that they're a part of something that's bigger than them right you know and most of those people one thing you'll notice in that documentary for lack of a better term and I'm not trying to be cruel, they're fucking losers. Most of the people that got really locked into this shit are losers, meaning they're social outcasts.

They're not successful in their chosen field. They're not particularly interesting or disciplined or excellent at anything. So being a part of something larger than that makes them feel... Yes. Makes them feel significant. It also makes... Yeah. It makes them feel like they're a part of the winning team. Yeah. You know? It's the same mentality where people become like rabid sports fans. We know like where they want to fight someone who is from an opposing team,

you know, who, who, who roots for the other team. It gets really like so sad that if they lost, because as if you do, we're on the field. Exactly. I remember when I was a kid, um, the Red Sox lost the world series and, um, what's the fucking dude's name who let the ball go through his legs? Bill Buckner. He let the ball go through his legs? Bill Buckner. He let this ball go through his legs and everybody freaked the fuck out. It was a normal error, but it was in the World Series and the Red Sox lost. And people were just walking down the street. They left their house.

They couldn't fucking take it. They were just walking down the street shaking their head. They couldn't fucking believe it. Couldn't fucking believe it. It meant so much to them. And this was at a time in my life where I had completely abandoned baseball. I wasn't interested in it at all because I'd really gotten into martial arts. And so I used to be a baseball fan. And in fact, the way I found the Taekwondo school that I eventually joined was through a baseball game. I went to a baseball game at Fenway Park and then waiting for the T,

which is the transit system, waiting to get on the T, I wound up walking up the stairs and found this Taekwondo school. So I had this weird connection. So for me, it was like this changing of the way I looked at the world. I'm looking at these people that are freaked out

about a fucking guy who dropped a ball. Like, this is not your life. I think it points points to also again how how good we kind of have it that these type of like we haven't again on a without saying obviously people are going through some shit but it's when something like that can ruin your day. Right. You're doing pretty good in life. Yeah. And or it might be a little bit of the opposite, meaning that's the only thing good in your life is that you have a team that's doing really well.

But, you know, I remember right in the very beginning of all this, I was talking to my grandmother. She's 93. She's been through a war, you know, like, you know, and, and, and she was using this word, I, you know, luckily, I speak Chinese, but I speak like a, like a child, I don't, I can't do poetry, I don't know any floofy language. So I speak fluently, but not in that way. And she was using this word over and over and over again. And, and, and I assumed it meant COVID covid she's kept using it obviously this context clues told me it was about covid and then she said um so i asked my mother i was like what was this word that she keeps using and she texted it to me so i can google it it was the plague that she was using

the word as the plague like we're going through the plague and then i told her about it i said i never heard this word before and this is her. And it blew my mind when she said, she's like, I guess I should be very thankful that I raised my grandson in an age that he never had to learn the word for this. made me think about imagine your kids kids one day not knowing what racism what that word is in a history book and like what's this word that keeps popping up 50 years ago we were really stupid we used to judge people by their pigment and they're like oh my god really and like they had a whole word for it we used to call it this way we used to judge people on their race and the idea that that these type of concepts didn't that that we had to create a word for it because whatever. And it was fascinating for her to think about it that way because it's like, yeah, how – I didn't have – I never knew this word. And so she's like, I should be thankful that you never had to learn it because we knew that word because we had to deal with a lot of shit like this overseas back in the day.

Well, especially when she was a child. was just a decade after the spanish flu yeah right which is yeah crazy and then to think of again the the the non-scientific way it must have felt like a plague this would have been the plague you know it would have felt like that just random like without understanding it you know even though obviously during spanish flu actually people actually knew about it a little bit more but it's still it's like perspective wise i think when people gravitate these things like you said q and searching for all this stuff we have a lot of time to to dwell on this stuff as opposed to when things were really really tough and you were about to get eaten by wolves right you weren't concerned about what people were wearing or what

shirt they were wearing or whatever it is what the problem is that i think those same sort of survival instincts and tribal instincts they get hijacked by something like q anon yeah and then it becomes your identity yeah that you're down with q and you understand q and they all these t-shirts say where we go one we go all and they get real wacky with it because it becomes everything to them. But you see that in so many aspects of our society. You see it in people who are vaccinated versus unvaccinated. You see it in people that support masks and lockdowns versus support freedom. You see it in people that are left wing versus right wing,

people that care about climate change versus people that think we have other problems that are bigger and we need to- Tribalism. Yeah. That sort of tribalism and also the adopting of ideas instead of thinking them through, this predetermined pattern of behavior and thought that so many people just sort of adopt instead of thinking through themselves, form their own opinions, decide that these opinions are not you. They're just thoughts and ideas and don't identify with them. Don't, don't make them your identity. There's, there's something I remember reading a study

about that was fascinating about talking about the changing of your opinion is akin to actual physical damage like there's like there's actual pain associated with it there's some for some folks yeah no for for all of us is saying that there's depending on how the the trickle-down effect of of saying of um of changing something that you identify with could shatter your entire world. Like if you believed in, you know, I have to show it to you. I have to find the article about it. But, you know, I'm butchering the science behind it.

But it's along the lines of saying that if you really based off your identity off of a religious thought process, or let's say as a kid, it's like you believed in Santa Claus and then all of a sudden found out they were, you know you know whatever i'm about to spoiler alert for the people who might be listening that don't know that yet but that concept is actual if they really kind of you know do a do a brainwave study it's like it registers almost as pain yeah you know because you have your whole everything that all the stuff below it or above it, however you want to say it, it was just shakes.

It gets, you know, completely disrupted. And I think that a lot of people aren't willing to do that. It's like this is why when you believe in this, when you associate with this one thing or so this one team or this one person or this person, just like why they say never meet your heroes. It's like, why is it so crazy to think that this human is flawed? Right. But before you met them, that ruined your whole day. And it's like, why is that weird? Well, it's because I'd rather have just lived my entire life thinking this person is amazing instead of finding out that they're just like me in that way.

They're flawed. They're a flawed human, you know. just like me in that way. They're flawed. They're a flawed human, you know? And it's an interesting thing. I think now with this kind of stuff is like when you join these tribes, you join these kind of mentalities,

it's like this being a part of this community, you know, this stuff just really helps people who are kind of, like you said, lost. Well, I saw that a lot with gangs, you know, growing up. It's like these aren't criminals. These are people that didn't want to do that. They need family. they need family. You know, we grew up in the thing is very, very logical to me to see. Like I, I luckily, like I, even though it's group single parent and everything like that, and my grandmother helped raise me, um, you know, I, I didn't go that direction.

I could see because if I was going through some shit and this person over here said they would help me out and watch my back. it's like that's how it starts. Yeah, it makes complete total sense. Yeah. And when you think about the erosion of the family and how many people don't have that feeling of someone being completely committed to them or a tribe that they completely belong to. And then something comes along like a gang that not only are they completely committed to you, but they weren't willing to kill. And the people that are different,

the people that are opposed, they are the literal enemy, which is something that's hardwired into us from the real tribal days, from the days of when you were literally a small group of 150 people worried about being invaded by other people. And that was the reality of human existence for thousands and thousands of years. And I think our brain is very binary in that way, too.

I think that that's I think that's what we talk about also in this tribe, in this kind of organization, the stuff that we're doing now is that it's very hard for us to kind of think in this gray which really exists it's like it's either pro or anti and in reality it's like most people kind of live in this middle right you know in reality you know it's like this kind of conversation about it are you pro this are you anti that it's like i'm neither of neither depending on the situation right you know it's it's like you're talking about it's like either either you hunt and you're pro killing every animal on earth or you have to be vegan or something like that it's this weird thing where we kind of polarize and we just naturally i think it's easier i think it's easier to just be you know galvanized into this kind of thing

and put somebody into this little box as opposed to having to sit there and go, all right, well, what's the world? Where's all the nuance in all of this conversation? And it is, it is, it's hard to do that. And I think that that's most people don't have the time. Yeah. Well, that's part of the problem. Right.

We don't take the time because if you work all day though, like say if you have some like labor intensive job or some job that requires a lot of thinking and you know you got eight hours a day plus commuting the amount of time that you have left to sort through all the ideas that you would need to vet in order to have like a real nuanced perspective on life it's very hard like i've had conversations with people, regular folks, where they'll say something and I'll say, well, why do you think that? And they're like, well, that's just true. I go, well, tell me why you think it's true. And then you see this uncomfortable moment where they don't have any access to information

at all. They don't even know. They just think that it's the right thing to say. Like hey, maybe it's good if we censor these people. Like, well well censorship has never been good historically and here's why and you have these conversations with them and then you realize they never thought this through at all they never thought through where this all goes they just have decided that if you say a certain thing a certain group of people that they're

friendly with or familiar with yes you go yes yes, and that's what they want. They want that yes. Yeah. You bring up a good point on that too because I think that that's one of usually my big question is I don't necessarily care what you believe in. I just want you to know why you believe in it. Yes. I want to know why you believe in it. Right.

Because I have a right to disagree with you. Yeah. But at least I want to know that you have a reason behind that. It's hard for me to express. least I want to know that you have a reason behind that. It's hard for me to express. It's hard for me to kind of respect this, like you said, piggybacking off of another idea because it makes you feel good or makes you feel better about it. You know, it is what it is, but I just want to, I want you to know why you feel that way. So then I can look at you eye to eye and sit there and go, hey, agree to disagree. I think we could develop a way of doing this where what becomes attractive,

the tribe that you're on is tribe open-minded conversation. Right. And then just that should be a tribe, and we should reject people that have these dogmatic, ideological perspectives that aren't thought through. And just reject that kind of thinking from yourself. Reject that kind of thinking from other people and be able to recognize it. Recognize it and sort of call it out.

Yeah, I think that there's also this moment where you got to stop trying to convince people to come to your side. Right, right, right. I think that's the big thing. I think ultimately when you have this conversation with somebody and somebody says something, an opinion, and that you have this drive inside you to tell them that they're wrong, to convince them that they're right. I mean, I think you and I are alike in that way where I'm curious as to why you believe this. Not necessarily because I need you to believe what I believe, but I recognize that you don't believe what I believe. So I'm curious as to why you believe this. Not necessarily because I need you to believe what I believe. Right. But I recognize that you don't believe what I believe.

So I'm curious as to why you believe that. Man, there's people that are trying to get you to switch to Android. You know? Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Or Apple. They just want you to be on their side.

Yeah, for sure. Like, fuck no matter what it is. Yeah. You know, what type of car you drive or the way you eat. I mean, that's a lot of what even, even being a vegan is. I mean, there are people that they, they want to have less cruelty and they're doing it for all the right reasons, but then there's people that just, they're locked into a different ideology and that ideology to them has become a part of their identity.

And now they're trying to tell you that raw fruit is the only thing that you should be eating. And you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I have a big aversion towards, not aversion, I have a tendency to really, like, inconsistency really kind of, it's like, jabs me in the eye. So it's just kind of like when somebody talks to me and it's like, well, you can believe whatever you want. If you want to be a vegan, it's your choice. Absolutely. I respect that. Matter of fact, I try to accommodate in the hospitality industry to make sure.

Again, I don't like apologies, so let's make some good veggie dishes and stuff like that rather than here's a salad or let me just remove the meat and you can do that. But when you start talking about cruelty and everything, I'm like, well, how far have you taken it? Because what about other products? And what about the leather belt that you're wearing? And what about the leather shoes that you're wearing?

Or the horrors of monocrop agriculture. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff where I'm like, I'm not trying to call you out to say that you shouldn't be this way. It's just that your reasoning behind it doesn't compute to me. It just feels a little bit inconsistent. It's like if somebody comes up to me and talks to me, it's like whether you want to do this health, this is healthy for you or that is healthy for you. And it's like, yeah, but you also eat like it's like we're talking about somebody who says that or they're concerned about what they put in their bodies or whatever it is. And you're like, if anybody has ever done, I had a conversation the other day, it was like, if you've ever done any recreational drugs,

you really have no right to talk about that. You're concerned about testing and, and whether or not something has what you put in your body because you didn't vet that stuff. I'm okay with you not wanting to do that. But again, the consistency for me is to say that just believe it across the board or don't believe it across the board. But it's to me, it's like that's the kind of conversation that I have with somebody is to say it's like even with, like you said, dogmatic things when I just naturally start poking holes and stuff because I'm just curious as to see what it takes to break an argument. I just think there's a fascination for me to break down an argument. Whether or not I still believe it at the end of the day doesn't mean anything. I might still believe it and say that I still want to do that. Like I said, inviting this guy in to speak to me about their religion, and at the end of the day I might believe in my religion

and still say that, hey, that's fine, but at the very least I let you speak your peace. You know, I think at the end of the day, the big problem is people that identify with their ideas and their ideas aren't just something that they're examining. And, you know, there's there's things that are obviously cleared. You know, don't kill, don't rape, don't murder, don't kill don't rape don't murder don't steal don't light people's houses on fire there's like real clear things right and then as you pass those you get into grayer areas like this religion versus that religion like why do you believe this and why do you think that's wrong what and it becomes your identity in a lot of ways.

And when your identity is wrapped up in ideas, and these aren't, again, not moral or ethical ideas that we could agree are beneficial to communities and beneficial to groups, but instead just ideas that you have decided to adopt and that these now are a thing that you will fight for. You know, blue no matter who. Right. There's a lot of those dummies out there, right? And they just have decided that the Democratic Party is right no matter what.

Or red. Red till dead. You know, there's those people too. And that kind of nonsense thinking. And you support these ideas as if they're literally a part of who you are. Right, because changing that mind requires you to change your entire identity. What makes you, it forces you to think.

No, no, what I'm saying is like, it's so difficult because if you associate your entire identity with this idea, when somebody disrupts that idea, your entire identity is disrupted. Yeah, well that's so dumb. And it's so fucking common. It's probably more common than not.

More people are probably idea-connected than are not. Yeah. I think you said it also very good point, which is who has the time. That's a big one. I mean, because it does take me three times longer to read a news article. Yeah. Because I got to vet. I don't have to.

I could be like a lot of other probably most people. They're counting on it. If I read this and something doesn't vibe with me, I sit there and I go look up and I do research. I mean, we don't all have a Jamie right next to us, you know, checking everything that we say and calling us out if I was wrong. It's like the idea that forever for this whole time, I thought that Jay-Z said that quote, right? And then I was like, well, I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong. But, you know, and so but it's like but we don't have most people don't take that time. Like if somebody else would have corrected me on the on this on the bus and i don't know if anybody would have taken the time to google that and make sure well that's not even important right that's not even important right like important shit important stuff yeah have to look up and try to figure out like why are we in afghanistan or why is this happening or why is that important or why is this law being passed or what's you know what's the real motivation behind this drug being pushed like what what the fuck is going on with that guy who's and there's so much of that in this world that it's

you could lose yourself like if you didn't have a job and your entire day was sifting through the news and trying to find truthful narratives versus propaganda, you would lose your fucking mind. How much do you think is that because how much you think right now the exaggeration of it is because of that, because that people have a chance to now consume so much of this information. I think that, you know, locking people in their house where they just have access to the internet.

I think I thought about it this way when I remember we were in the beginnings of our first quarantine kind of lockdown thing. And I was like, but I still had Netflix and I still had FaceTime and I still had, I mean, it didn't, I was like, this is fine. Like I really, it wasn't that bad. I wasn't going crazy, but I was like,

imagine if this happened in 1985. Right, right. I mean, and you had to wait till the next morning to get a newspaper. Well, maybe the newspaper wouldn't even be printed because nobody worked in the newspaper. And imagine if the newspaper was as full of shit as CNN is. And then you're lost. You really don't know what's true or what's lies, what's propaganda. Yeah, you have that one thing.

And so I was thinking like, man, how difficult would it have been? How much more isolated would it have been if we just can only get the information twice a day, once a day? And at one channel to two or three channels, local news or whatever it was. We didn't even have that, whatever. Well, there was so much propaganda back then they just slipped through the cracks it took forever before something Hit the light of day right Right where something was all an obvious like especially a government shit like golf a Tonkin incident that led us into Vietnam

I mean, there's a bunch of those yeah Instances a lot of gatekeepers back there. Yeah. Oh, my God. And there was agreements with the news. The news had agreements with politicians and government agencies. And they followed the narrative. Yeah. So I think that maybe us now with access to all this information and all this content and all this data and all these people, all this information and all this content and all this data and all these people, all these voices of somebody that used to do 10 minutes of Twitter now doing four hours of Twitter and just sitting there and getting in these loop rabbit holes. I mean, it's got to be damaging. Like we said,

a lot of it is junk food. I treat a lot of it like junk food. I love a potato chip every once in a while, but if I ate it for eight hours a day, I think I would probably be pretty unhealthy. And so it's like consuming this kind of garbage. Yeah. There's a guy named Alan Levinovich and he's, uh, he's, he's looked at it in the same way you look at processed food. That's how he described it. He's like, you, you, you can't eat all processed food and you can't eat all processed information. And that's what it is. It's like this social media version of information is just processed information. And you're getting it in these weird sort of bursts and it's all boiled down with preservatives on it and filled with nonsense. It has an agenda. And it's like, you know, I think that there is a monetization of of human suffering, I think, is difficult. You know, anytime you have that opportunity to where,

because it's more interesting and it's more, you want eyeballs onto your content. So you just, it's a very simple algorithm. It's just, we just need eyeballs. So whatever got people to watch it, then let's get more of that instead of stuff that's not interesting. You know, that's might be just very boring data, you know?

And so I think you just tend to lean towards that kind of stuff a little bit. And I think it's tough. Yeah, I just, that's the that's the stuff that always fascinates me a little bit. It's just because I think I think it takes us I don't think we have a lot of people have that kind of thing. I think that a lot of people are just like, I don't I don't bother with that. I don't I don't take the time to think. No, they don't have the time. They don't take the time. And that's oddly enough where podcasts have sort of come in to fill that void. Because in podcasts, you can have two intelligent people just sitting down talking about stuff in a way like, well, maybe that's not true. Maybe this is true. Let's find out. Let's discuss this and let's figure out why people are saying this thing that is clearly untrue and saying it across like multiple platforms. Like what's the motivation behind this? Like, yeah, that's a thing that didn't exist before. Because first of all, in the past, we didn't think of the news as being this thing that was lying to us. Yeah, that's that's a real recent thing. And I think a lot of that was exacerbated during the time that Trump was

president, because the media was so upset that Trump had become the president and so upset that this what they thought this con man was now running the entire government that it's time to fight fire with fire and so they started attacking in the same way that they felt like he was attacking the way he would you know call people by a nickname you know lion Ted or you know fucking lion Hillary or crooked Hillary or you know, Lion Ted or, you know, fucking Lion Hillary or Crooked Hillary or, you know, have all these nicknames for people. Yeah. Call the news the fake news and like, God, we have to fight fire with fire. We have to attack the same way he's attacking. But in doing so, they've undermined their credibility to an almost irreparable way.

Right. And that's what's scary. Right. What's scary is that the amount of people that actually trust the news now is fucking lower than ever. Lower than ever. And I think it's because we all believe that people have an agenda.

Even with science, people think, we are so used to people having an agenda that people think that there's an agenda with everything. And there might be. I mean, not to say that there isn't. I think that that's the balance of it all to sit there and say, I'm again, I'm even victim of what we're talking about right now, which is to say that while I believe that we probably lean this way.

We're not to say that it's a purified like that. It's no such thing that it's not possible that there's some puppet master out there that's really kind of affecting this this way with that the third but i'm just saying that at the end of the day um not everything has such a mastermind full type of thought process behind it i think some of it is a lot more um simple i think it's a lot simpler sometimes it's about just money sometimes it's about just most of it's about money yeah that's most of it's about narratives narratives that are set up in order to have people extract money from a system. And that's what's really scary is that you follow the money and it's right there. And, you know, many people have talked for years about getting money out of politics

and getting money out of – to make it so that these people that make these huge decisions that affect policy, affect the way we're allowed to live our lives, that there should be no money being exchanged in these decisions. There should be no motivation. No one should profit from these things. No one who wants to be a politician should ever get exorbitantly wealthy from being a politician. But yet that's the case over and over and over again. And that's dirty.

That's dirty. And that is what affects these people. And that's what affects the way they behave and the way they communicate and the things they talk about and the things they won't talk about. Maybe sometimes is as important. Yeah, I think that that goes in with the incentivization of certain things. And that's what I was talking about earlier about the incentivization of human suffering

and stuff like that. There's a fascination, I think there's a comedian named Bo Burnham. Yeah, sure. And he's got this whole bit about talking about how it's weird. It's like a company

that manufactures rape whistles. It's like there's a conflict of interest. Oh, that's a great bit. That's a great idea. It's like there's a conflict of interest. No, that's a great bit. That's a great idea. It's true, right? It's like- Like they go out of business. The goal is through that.

I remember I sat in, and let me turn this on its head. I sat on a couple of charity boards and they talk about it in a very corporate way. Growth, fundraise more. We're up 25% from last year, we're up up 25 from last year right 10 from last year and i was like i want this to be the last board i sit on i want this charity to end next month next year because i want to finish what we just are doing right now i want to be done with it right

you know i want us to be like why do we have that charity? That problem is solved. We looked into this problem. I had Coleon Noir on and he schooled me about homelessness. You know, because we were talking about Los Angeles. And he said, do you know why the homeless situation gets worse and worse and worse? He goes, because people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a salary taking care of the homeless. And it doesn't get any better because there's no incentive for it to get better. And every year the budget gets bigger and there's more homeless people. They do the opposite of fix it. And so he started showing, he pulled up all these figures and showed us all the data,

particularly for Los Angeles. And you're like, oh, like they're farming homeless people. They're literally, dude, there's people in Los Angeles that are making quarter million dollars a year working on the homeless people. Oh my God. They're literally, dude, there's people in Los Angeles that are making quarter million dollars a year working on the homeless problem. And that fucking homeless problem is broken. Like,

they are not doing a good job with that. Right. It's fucking terrible. It's, but that's exactly it. I think that whenever you talk about it to incentivize that,

it's tough. You know, I think that it's, I see it a lot. So we see it, I see it in that kind of situation where we're like if we if if if the if the product that or or the the that whatever you use is human suffering then the logical said in order for me to make more profit from it i need more suffering you. It's like there's, although we talk about there's more money in the treatment than it is in the cure.

Yeah, that's terrifying. And so it's like, so then that, but that's a very systematically simple to think about. Like it's, everyone understands that. I make a sandwich. If I can make if I get the bread cheaper, I'll try to do that. If I can make the bread, you know, I can get this more. I can get it to more people.

All these are all some basic business 101. And so but then you start doing that with other things that are a little bit more needed for society, the insurance or healthcare or prison system, all this stuff. When you have money attached to it, the incentivization starts to become human experiences. And so then you start a situation where, yeah, in order for us to like use, like we said, like Bo Burnham's bit, there'd be weird to sit,

imagine sitting in the boardroom and talk about sales are plummeting, but that would be a good thing. Right. In theory. But it's like, no, in this world, you'd have a situation where you're like, no. Like if the insurance company sat there and goes, hey, we paid out millions of dollars last month from actual people that needed our service. You're like, we got to stop that. It's like a weird conversation to have.

Right. But you can't treat certain things the same way we treat businesses. And the problem is they do. Like if business is booming in the burger business, that's great. It means more people want burgers. If business is booming in the homeless business, that means you are not doing your job. You are allowing the homeless crisis to get worse and worse. And you're getting more and more money.

And the budget gets bigger and bigger every year. And no one hits the brakes on it because it's literally farming. They're farming homeless people. I mean, and that's the case with so many problems that we have in this society. There's people whose job it is to take care of that situation, and if that situation goes away, so does their job. So there's zero incentive. That's right. And that's zero incentive. That's right. And that's the thing is even talking about even politics, like the idea that that becomes your job. It's like, well, the intention is for you to stay when that job, nobody wants to lose

their job. It should be a countdown timer. Like I said, it really became prevalent to me in these conversations with these charities that I sat down and that I'm talking about was that we want my last check, we want the last check to bounce. We want to be, we want to raise X number of dollars and say we're good. Go raise money for something else.

This is enough for us to finish this problem. Well it's spooky when you look at a charity and you find out how much money the actual charity gets, like how much goes to the actual problem and how much goes to administration costs problem and how much goes to administration costs and how much it goes to the salaries of people that are involved in the charity. And you're like, what is this really?

Like, is this really charity or is this a job? You have a job and your job is to do this. And if you keep doing this job, you keep making money. But if you fix the problem, you have no job. Yeah. And then, but the point of that, again, we're talking about is, is that, you know, the marketing that's required to do that, you know, it's the idea of saying how much effort is put into, to fundraising and how much time it takes also.

So there's a lot of resources that are attached to that, you know, um, I don't know, you know, I'm building. We're building the big art park out there by the airport, Hope Outdoor Gallery. It's a graffiti art park, music venue, and everything with art. And we have this drive that says that art should be free, that we want it to be that way. But it's a for-profit business. And what our thought process was, in order for art to be free, art has to beg for money all the time. You know, the museums and everything like that is constantly charity driven. And we're like, well, why don't we tie in? The reason I'm involved is for the F&B perspective is to say, if we get a whole bunch of people coming here to view art for free, and then we sell them all a drink and a hot dog, they could fund that art product. And then we could always make art free because people are going to naturally spend money on it anyways. It's kind of almost like an amusement park kind of business model. And it's like to me is a little bit of a disruptor in that way is because to sit there and say that these type of things, these the arts, quote unquote, you know, it's like, well, how do we to make it become a self-sustaining machine as opposed to constantly trying to fundraise.

Well, you have to throw a gala for 100 grand to raise 150 grand. Then you actually only made 100 grand, only made 50 grand. And so it's like a weird thing to where it's like, well, why don't we kind of start this machine and then just be done with it and say, let this kind of go.

Also, it's like when someone says art should be free, like, okay, why? No, no, no, no, access to art. How about that? How about even that? Why? Well, because I think that allowing art, it's like steel sharpens steel, right? I think that there's a thing to say that street art, for instance, the kind of person that goes out there to practice or to learn or to be able to express themselves.

I think it's important for people to do that. I don't think that everyone has their inner Vandal to go out and do that. Or especially- Their inner vandal? Right, it's like because if you're gonna be good at street art, you have to go and paint up some public wall somewhere. And it was one of the things that we noticed while we built the big art park,

the big graffiti park that was happening downtown town that was the original place. It allowed people to go in and just practice and allowed to just get some art in there. And this is like sitting there and saying that our belief was that the leap from like, let's say musicians or even a food vendor, there's a lot of steps that gets all the way from

serving it out of a food truck or a little hand cart to a Michelin star restaurant. How does a street artist get to be excellent? Right. And then on top of that, there's a huge jump between selling your stuff on the street corner to the MoMA, right? And it's like somebody getting a million.

And it's all arbitrary, right? I mean, Banksy did this thing a while back where he, whoever he was, or his minion or whatever it was that sold pieces on the street corner for 20 bucks and then Did it all on social media whatever and then showed people that hey you just bought an original Banksy for 20 bucks it's probably worth a lot more now and Nobody and people just liked it because they liked it and they were supporting this one random artist

But then the exhibit was in there they do that all the time there's this guy that was playing violin in the subway outside the Philharmonic and he was actually going to go in there and play at late night for a concert. And these people were tossing him 50 cents as opposed to paying $200 to get a seat at his own thing. And it's like, and so when I say that, I'm saying that we need to be able to get to the point where it, the education part, the skill side to, to, to separate the wheat from the chaff and say that, hey, this is what I want to do for a living. Let me teach you how to do it. Our goal is to say if you're an artist and you want to make a living being an artist, it shouldn't be a risk in that way.

You might not be good at it, which is fine. But we need to teach somebody how to start a corporation so that they understand how to do their taxes properly. We need to tell them how to trademark their stuff or copyright their things so they don't do this kind of stuff. Or the education somebody's aware when somebody says they want to become an artist that they don't have to start off. How do you have the time to do all this? How do you have the time to do all this while you're involved in multiple businesses and restaurants? Restaurants, luckily at this point, is backfilled, meaning I've left the day a day to day operations for the restaurants. Generally we have managers and we have people below. Do you ever step into the kitchen? No, not anymore. And I also, well, I never, I never cooked

on the line at the restaurants. I don't cook that way. I don't like cooking that way. I was, one of the reasons why I never became a professional, professional chef in that way was because I don't want to cook the same thing over and over again. I was always talking about, I cook like jazz. Like every meal from this different from day to day because I, whatever I feel like. So you just establish the menu,

help establish it. I was operations a hundred percent. Like I'm an operations guy now. I do hospitality consulting. It's like if, like I said, if you know, if you sat there and you were like,

CK, let's open up something. Let's, let's do it. I have 20 years of operational experience. I can talk to chefs and speak educated to a, to a culinarian. I can also talk to a bartender and understand about that. And I can also talk to an accountant and talk to them about how the business needs to run to be able to be profitable. Like that's the part of me that, that that's the experience that I have. The the part the love I have was the final product Mm-hmm this this experience that people have kind of amazing that you've managed to navigate that world though and get to the other side while still

Maintaining your love for the food itself and the way it's cooked and I think that's what that's the thing That's what did it though. I think that me not having to grind to turn it into that. I think that's what kept me sane. I think that if I had to cook the same thing, if I was the guy who invented chicken wings, he probably never wants to see another chicken wings. That's a good point, right? You're kind of a prisoner. To your own success. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I remember talking about it. I remember I had a band that played at the nightclub that I ran that refused to play their hit. Because they were just tired of it? Tired of it. And I'm like- What band was that?

It was- You don't have to say. Okay. If you feel bad. Well, it's just, it was one of those things where I was like, I get it. Pretty free bird, right?

Yeah. But I'm like, yo, play free bird, bitch. But, but Hey, that's what got you here,

man. Come on, man. That's why the people are here. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also weird, especially in your industry.

That was the weirdest shit I've ever seen in my life was I went to go see, uh, Brian Regan at the, at the, um, the W whatever it is to go see Brian Regan at the at the The W whatever this at Moody Theatre and at the end he did an encore and And people were just yelling out bits from his Comedy Central special. Mm-hmm and

He was like normally people come to his show to hear new stuff Apparently all aren't like that. So he just like, all right, name three bits and I'll just do them. He just did like, he did like word for word. It was actually wonderful to see because I knew his old material. And I was like, man, as I talk about rehearsed and I mean, like I said, the part that I admire about your job is that you're telling a story, and it sounds like the first time you ever told it, but you guys have rehearsed the shit out of it.

There's guys like him and Gaffigan. There's a few of those guys that have these signature bits that, like with Bert Kreischer, it's like the machine story. It's like he doesn't feel like he can get off stage unless he says the machine story. So he'll do his whole set and then he'll have to tell that story too that's his free bird yeah yeah there's a prison in that yeah it happens with dave i remember a couple times i've watched dave and people i'm rich

bitch yeah i just start screaming bits at him and i'm just like i don't like what in the world but what a weird experience it is as an audience member to to want that to just be like it's just drunks too though that's a part of the problem is one of the things about nightclub performing and performing doing stand-up is you're guaranteed to be in a room full of drunks yeah it's like there's very few jobs where you know like if you go to a concert, I guess concerts are pretty similar in that way. But there's very few other art forms where the people that are consuming the art form are almost guaranteed to be drunk. Yeah. But in comedy shows, man.

But what's weird about the comedy part is that the part of it that's amazing is the part that you want is a surprise. Yeah. The punchline. Some people do. Right. With music, I understand. I want to hear that song. I can listen. I want to hear that song. I can listen.

I can burn out a song. Some people want that fucking bologna sandwich over and over and over and over and over. That's true. They never grow up. Well, my nephew, who's two, can play peek-a-boo for four and a half hours. Yeah, but that's that mentality.

Yeah, exactly. Do it again. And some people, they just want you to react. They just want to be able to say something and then you react to them yeah yeah they just want to know you're you recognize they're alive you know yeah just want to disrupt and and people oftentimes are selfish too so they don't care if it fucks up the show as long as they can get you to react that's like uh dave and i did a show in vegas a few weeks back and um there was this

fucking guy who kept fucking with him and then you know finally he had to yell out man we just shut the fuck up and you could tell how upset he was and how upset the audience was it was just this dummy that needed attention and there's a lot of people out there that think that that's okay they think that they should be able to just get attention. I got you to talk. They think that's fun. They're just like a human troll. It's so weird.

It's so weird. But like I said, I watch that interaction, and it's fascinating to me. I think that it's – I always look again when I was talking about who it first invented Fried food. I think about the same thing with your profession. Just the idea that we're bartering pre money The idea of say I wonder what came first with the idea that we could sit there and go yo that dude go to Joe Have him tell me tell you the story about what happened to him last week But he's gonna you're gonna need a chicken He's gonna take you need to bring him a chicken or he won't tell you the story about what happened to him last week. But you're going to need a chicken. You need to bring him a chicken or he won't tell you the story.

I think it might have started. They think it probably started with Mark Twain. That late? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Stand-up comedy is very recent. Very recent.

And then it became a different thing. It became things where people would just tell joke jokes. And then along the lines, Lenny Bruce came along. And Lenny Bruce was heavily influenced by drugs. And his love of drugs, I think, also led to an erosion of the sensibilities of the common culture. Like he felt like they were foolish and he would examine them and discuss them and then talk about all these like sort of taboo subjects and talk about all these things that we just took for granted that are really kind of ridiculous.

And that was – Lenny Bruce is the real godfather of modern stand-up. And then there was Mort Saulahl who existed in kind of the same era he was more politically oriented and there's quite a few other people that came around that would that were influenced by him and then you know George Carlin of course and Pryor. Pryor was the first guy to take that sort of brutal honesty and turn it on himself and make it very personal and very relatable and also just masterfully funny. He was so much funnier than anybody that had ever come along before him.

So much funnier that even though comedy is very connected to the time. If you try to watch some comedy movies from the 80s, they look so dated and stupid. But if you can watch a Richard Pryor special from 1980, it's still damn good. Yeah. Damn good. Yeah, because he was so good that it transcended. But it still doesn't explain to people.

It doesn't really resonate with people how good he was back then. Because the time's so different. Like the era is so different that if you could somehow or another transport yourself back to 1983 and watch prior, then you would understand. But you would have to exist in the time period to be able to really appreciate how groundbreaking he was. I think about that way with some musicians at the time, you know, just the idea, like, I watch concerts. Kendrick's.

Or even, like, the Beatles and people, like, passing out. It's just the idea that you're, like, listening to it, and I'm like, I don't know if I would. I like the Beatles, but I don't know if I'd pass out. Right. Like, just to be, like. They'd never heard anything like it. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's just, to me, it's's, it's amazing for this type of craft. And I think that, uh, it's something that, you know, like I said, it's, it's, I admire the creative, the creative process of that because it is, it's, it's storytelling in a, in a way. things, whether it's music or art or any kind of art, all these in food and literature, all these different things just make life a richer experience because you're sharing in the way other people view and express themselves in the world, the way they view the world and where they express themselves in the world. You share in that and you get a little bit of something. You get a little bit of an understanding of how they make you feel. and then you're more aware of how you make other people feel because of that yeah and i think that helps us i think yeah i think that that's why i think we talk about it is one of the things that dave does so well you do um the comedians that i enjoy watching the most have a way of of really kind of bridging these gaps a little bit you know because of being

able to it's almost like tricking us the listener to through comedy of saying something that i agree with and then at the very last second going ha you actually agree with we actually agree with the person that you didn't agree with right you. And you're like, crap. Or you're saying something that I'm about to be offended by and then turning it at the end and go, oh, I said that already. Like I believe that actually. Yeah. And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed that aspect of being that there's a masterful, there's maestro level of conducting of a crowd that I really, really love. And that's what you're talking about. I think there's something about how exciting it is a crowd that i really really love and that's what

you're talking about i think there's something about how exciting it is to see a room full of people enjoying your food i just think that it's like you know my brief stint when i was in high school theater and when you had when you got a line when you got when you got the line that you're like this is a line that everybody's gonna laugh at and knowing it it's just like set up knock it out you know and is is this, and it's this feeling. And it's like, I remember I was at a Wu-Tang concert in London and it's just like, just like to play a crowd like an instrument,

to be able to sit there and go, everyone throw your hands up, boom. Everyone throw your W's up, boom. Thousands of people doing whatever you want. How could you not feel like, jump, this side jump, this side sit down, this side do this this how do you not have a rush from that right it's also the fact that you're participating you know like you're part of the experience you're not just experiencing you're part of the experience yeah and as a comedian i

think that that's to me is is what it is how do you address a room of a thousand people and make them feel like i'm part of that experience? It's crazy to me. It's amazing that we do that. I think that the ones that I enjoy are the ones that make, like I'm watching it on TV, and I feel like they're talking to me. You know what I mean? It's really, really kind of cool.

That's the one thing that's really amazing about this time is there's so much art. There's so much stuff that people have created that you have access to that can change your perceptions of life and that can enhance your perceptions of life and enhance the way you've the way you understand how human beings think and express themselves there's so much of that now and i I think you said it right. We need to start a tribe where that is a joy. Yeah. Like we should share in this like, yo, I discovered something. Rock my world.

Right. I believe this forever. And instead of going like clutch my pearls. Right. Consciously attempt to not be polarized. Like consciously work on it. Don't embrace polarization. Don't embrace these ideological rifts between people. Don't embrace any of this tribal bullshit that people are

addicted to today. That's got to be something that people really strive for. And that can help us. That can help because at the end of the day, most of us just want to have a good time. They just want to have good experiences with their friends. they just want to laugh and eat good food and and listen to good music and just enjoy their time on this earth yeah it's fleeting it's dave's little kindness conspiracy yeah it's like just to be start off with be kind how about that yeah like just take for a second to just sit there and say what would you say to this person if you if your ultimate goal was to be kind first yeah just how would you say to this person if your ultimate goal was to be kind first? Yeah.

How would you talk to this person if you had any concern about whether or not this person would get there, would get, would feel like pain from what you're saying? Yeah. Would you take some more, would you take a second, take a beat to sit there and think about what you're going to say? So, yeah, I think that, you know, that's how I live my life. You know, I think that ultimately that, and again, the restaurant industry helps because we're a watering hole. All kinds of people eat. So I'm one of those things that I'm particularly blessed in that way.

I think that I've come across as many different types of people as possible. I speak freely about my beliefs generally on, you know, two people, but at the restaurant, we all got to eat. And so I'm happy to serve you despite what you believe and despite what you like. And again, it's, if my ultimate goal is for you to have a good experience and to have a good time, I, I, I want to treat you that way. And if you want to sit down and talk about some stuff about how you believe good time, I, I, I want to treat you that way. And if you want to sit down and talk about some stuff about how you believe I, I treat, I take it through that same filter. You know, like I said, I don't judge you for it. I don't, I think I will openly tell you that,

that I don't like that way, but here's your ketchup. It's a good way to wrap this up. thank you brother man thank you for having me on it was very enjoyable I really appreciate it thank you and thanks for having an awesome restaurant just being a general

all around cool guy man I appreciate you appreciate you too alright bye everybody bye