Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #339 - Papa John Schnatter Joins To Discuss Cancel Culture And Media Lies

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia join THE Papa John Schnatter to discuss how unfairly he was let go from his own company over false allegations of racist speech, how John sought to make his community better through improving local colleges, how the media is deceptively spinning the January 6th events in contrast to the rioting that took place outside the White House during Trump's administration, and the origin story of the Papa John business model. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been seeing a lot of really creepy stuff with schools, what they're teaching kids, this critical race applied principles. There was a story we covered the other day where you get these little kids and they're showing these questionnaires they're asked. And this is whatever you want, whatever you want to call it. It's getting to the kids. It's affecting their ability to strive to succeed. It's telling them that they can't succeed on the basis of their race and things like this. This wave of what the left has referred to or the establishment has called social justice, in my opinion, is mostly about gaining power, political power, corporate power, otherwise. And there's one story that happened several years ago, and it's about the CEO of a very large and prominent company being essentially falsely

accused, or I should say the media spun a narrative that this CEO was a racist for describing a slur, in fact, saying it was a bad thing to say, but it doesn't matter. And it wasn't just Papa John Schnatter, who's, I pronounce it right, right? Schnatter? Schnatter. Schnatter, who's here with us today. There was also another story that I brought up in this old video about Netflix, where a guy was actually doing a training where he was like, here are the words to avoid. And by simply saying the word in a descriptive way to tell people it was bad, ended up losing his job. Now that one was crazy because the guy ends up going to HR where they're like, what happened? And he said, I was explaining to people that,

you know, these words were bad enough to say them. And they're like, what words? And he says it again. And then they're shocked. Oh, he said it to us again. He was, you asked him what he said, and he was saying it was wrong. Cancel culture is real and it's been, it's been going on for some time and it's evolving. And this is why I brought up what's happening with kids with critical race applied principle, because this is the extension, the evolution or another component of what we saw with cancel culture. Now we see a lot of people in media saying cancel culture is not real. It doesn't exist because all of these rich and famous people, they're still rich and famous. But here's a story of a guy who did nothing wrong, who was ousted from his own company,

started taking his name down from buildings. Now, that's insane. And in my opinion, it's an effort for some group to gain power. In this instance, it sounds like corporate and political interests realized they could manipulate public perception and opinion because everyone thinks, obviously, racism is bad. So they can twist things, use a morsel of truth, and build it up into a conspiracy theory or some false accusation that you can't really falsify. We're going to talk about that, and we're going to talk a bit about just what's going on with the labor market, what's going on with our kids. And we are joined by the CEO – I'm sorry, I'm sorry, the former CEO of Papa John's,

John Schnatter. Do you want to just quickly introduce yourself? John Schnatter, thanks, Ian. Thanks, Tim, for having me. Proud to be here and I think you told me to lead it off with better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John's. I used to, I got to be honest, I did this video, you were talking about how I did this video in 2018 and you were like it was spot on and everything. I vowed never to buy Papa John's again because of what they did to you because it was – I read the news and I'm like this is clearly BS. Here's a guy who's on a phone call saying like, hey, here's a bad word people shouldn't say. And they were like, we're going to fire him and destroy his life now because of it. And I used to think that the better ingredients, better pizza thing was just marketing.

I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd see you on the TV and I'd be like, yeah, better ingredients what does that mean well uh no i actually we actually were we order pizza all the time and when we do we order papa john's because we look i looked up the ingredients i'm not going to name the other pizza places uh call them out specifically because you know lawsuits or whatever but these other big chains they put weird stuff in their pizza they put one company puts splenda in their crust. And that, to me, was just weird. The potassium bromate is really concerning. What is that?

It's like a leavening agent. Can you explain that a little better? Anything that's processed food is the FDA approves, which unfortunately usually is chemical-based. I mean, you can get a can of soup from Campbell's, and it's got 20 or 30 chemicals in it. And so the thing we tried to do throughout the history of Papa John's was get rid of the chemicals, nitrates.

There were cellulose in the cheese. Anything, some of the preservatives, anything to keep it more natural, more original. We thought the more natural, the more authentic, the better it would be for the kids. And we just weren't convinced those chemicals in the food processing process were not unhealthy. So we eliminated as many of those as we could. And hopefully to this day, they're still doing that. Hopefully to this day. But we'll get into all that stuff.

So, you know, Ian's chilling. I'm so glad you're here, John. Papa John's, the recipe, it was the ingredients, but it changed my life in the 90s worth 150 million bucks in one day. So it was like I was 31 years old. It's like we just we just made 100 million bucks. Like, wow, it was pretty wild. We I want to talk about that, too. Obviously, we'll talk about the more political stuff.

But just hearing the story of the success, how to build a company, I'm sure a lot of people want to know, you know, tips for success, right? We can talk about, you know, good strategy can overcome mediocre tactics, but bad strategy can't overcome great tactics. So from the get-go, we were always authentic and about quality, but we didn't really have a tagline. So we read the book Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Reeves, 1969 of all, and read the book and talked about how you differentiate your product with your

slogan it's got to be truthful you know bobo safety um fedex is overnight etc so we hired jack trout to come in he was 10 000 bucks a day wow and he comes in this is like 95 96 and he's over there he looks at our fresh pack sauce from Cortopassi family out at Stanislaus. He looks at the way we're making our fresh dough, the tension to water, put a little more on, real cheese. He's going, well, heck, use better ingredients. I said, well, of course. He goes, well, better ingredients make a better pizza. And I go, yeah.

He goes, well, that's your slogan. There, it was born. I spent $10,000 and it took you about 20 seconds. There you go. So that was pretty cool. Let's love to get into that stuff too. We got Lydia pressing the button. I am pressing buttons in the corner. I'm very excited to meet Papa John because I learned to drive on a Camaro

and his story about recovering his lost Camaro is like a hero story to me. So I'm loving it. I'm enjoying talking to him. Were you 76 or 77? It was a 77 in my case. Beautiful. So much fun. All right, everybody, before we get started, head over to TimCast.com.

Become a member to get an ad-free experience and exclusive access to the TimCast Members Only podcast. You're also helping support our journalists, of which we are hiring more and more people. We had two more people start just the other day. We're going to be producing a lot more shows. So as a member, not only do you get access to this stuff, but we're going to be adding more and more content to it as we build culture instead of just complaining about the culture war. So again, go to TimCast.com, but don't forget to like this video, share this show with your friends, subscribe at the notification bell, assuming all that matters. And let's just, we're just going to jump in and have this conversation. I want to hear the story. Tell

us what happened. So real quick, real quick, just the general context is I think it was 2018. The story breaks that you, the, you know, at the time the CEO, Papa John's on a phone call and they said in this, I think it was a Forbes article, right? It was Forbes article came out claiming that you used a racial slur or something. And then all of a sudden this was like a cascade of them kicking you out of your company. They were trying to claim that you were a racist and all these really awful things. And then the media just began to twist you out of your company. They were trying to claim that you were a racist and all these really awful things. And then the media just began to twist everything out of proportion and lie about what was happening. Now, I guess the crazy thing is it sounds like the way you described it, like a conspiracy against you. Well, you got to kind of go back a little bit in time as it was a training call.

And we were talking about race, which is very sensitive. And we were the do's and don'ts. And unbeknownst to me they they taped the conversation and throughout the call they they tried to bait me when i was looking at who is oh the laundry service the ad agency was trying to get me riled up and to say something that was going to hurt myself but i didn't know that at the time that that was a it was a setup so um they kept that one little clip and fortunately for me i feel like i'm the luckiest guy in the world because they accidentally left the tape running so as soon as they hung up with me they kept talking about hey we got him we're gonna send him out really oh yeah we got the tape we got him on tape i got a tape so we have the truth

and so it was a complete setup um they sat on it for about five weeks, and they said, if you don't give us $6 million, Washabon and laundry service, we're going to bury the founder. And I went to the CEO and to the board, and I said, hey, they're trying to extort $6 million. If we don't give them $6 million, they said they're going to bury the founder. That's extortion we should call the FBI. And so it blew up, and the company just let it happen that's what makes me think the company was uh co-conspired in this because the company didn't do an investigation they didn't set up a special committee to investigate and if they would have they would

have seen there was a tape the truth was i didn't say something that was racist what i said was anti-racist they changed the narrative well we had to issue a quick clarification because of the likes of people like ibram x kendi anti-racist actually means racist and i'm not i'm not kidding i mean it's that's funny right but uh kendi is the the i guess he's the the progenitor of anti-racism which is an ideology that states in his i gotta be very careful how i say this for obvious reasons i mean look we're talking about kendy says that he wants racial discrimination so anti-racism according to him is more racial discrimination so that's why you know they they they take these phrase and try to control them and that's part of how they they play this game so to put it simply you're you're

you're the ceo of this company you're doing a regular training phone call. It was like a sensitivity training or something, right? Exactly. Telling people not to be racist, to be excellent to each other. And the statement you made was that you said something about, I think it was Colonel Sanders. Was it Sanders? Colonel Sanders was habitual about using the M word in a derogatory manner. And in my mind, that was a no-go. That's absolutely something a founder doesn't do so we were using him uh metaphorically as an example of what not to do and because you were like hey this is a bad thing don't be like him they were like we got him yes they recorded you and i didn't i didn't know that about the uh the recording where they admitted or they they're

like yeah we got him haha yeah when i heard they recorded the conversation i went good because what i said was anti-racist i knew what i said they asked me to apologize the next week and i said i'll apologize for the misunderstanding i'll apologize for what happened but if i apologize for saying something that's anti-racist then that's racist and i wasn't going to apologize yeah i got point out i said this before the show talking about a racial slur and the history of the word And its mechanics And how people feel about it Is different than calling someone that word

Completely different In fact you can call someone a very nice word In a horribly mean way And be more offensive than talking about a slur Oh yeah like if you were talking to a woman And you were like Oh you're so beautiful aren't you Yeah you look great today

Right right the way you say it But here's I got to to that ian it wasn't it's not just describing the word john was actually saying it was a bad thing yeah it was it was actually saying don't be racist yeah but i think in life you've got to own your own you got to take the hit and you know we're not going to bs your your audience there's three things we we can all agree on one is they set me up no doubt about it it was a setup um two is they set me up. No doubt about it. It was a setup. Two is they reversed what I said. I didn't use the word draw. I quoted, cited, paraphrased what somebody else says that I would never say.

And three, I shouldn't have said the word. Should not have said the word. Yeah, that's how they got you. Yeah. It's really challenging that we're in a space now where – let me just go back in time. George Carlin. Everybody loved George Carlin. He was a hero on the left, and he has a bit where he goes on stage and says as many racial slurs as he can and then actually calls two very prominent black comedians the N-word.

And even I, like by today's standards, I'm like, wow. Like that's brutal, man. I'm not sure I feel about that. But George Carlin was making a point that just saying the word isn't what's what's so bad about it what's bad is it's the person behind the word of the things they're doing with it now i gotta i gotta admit i'm not a a complete fan of the end of that bit from carlin even like especially by today's standards i'm kind of like well i don't think that that was appropriate saying the racial stars i understand the issue is you got to be able to say words to tell people what the words are you know what i mean like it was i i think the

problem with you saying the word was that they were able to manipulate that in the press changing it from john says a word and describes it as something you don't say and can criticize someone for saying it to john used a racial sl, used it as if to imply you called someone a name. The challenge now is there are instances where I was actually was talking to somebody. We have people come on the show all the time asking us about censorship and what do we have to watch out for? Because we know YouTube is very, very ban happy. And then someone was like, are we allowed to say the N word? And I was like, what? I was like, absolutely not. Are you joking? Like, you know, I'm not, I'm not a fan of that. And they're

like, really? I was like, even like in the context of World War II. And I went, you mean Nazi? And they're like, yeah, yeah. Because you can't say that either. Like just by saying that YouTube's algorithm will probably flag this video, downrank it, demonetize or whatever, simply for bringing up a word like that. And so there were these instances where I was talking to people, explaining to them the problem with not being able to even describe things anymore. There is a very famous documentary about a man named James Baldwin. I cannot tell you the name of that documentary because YouTube could ban us for simply saying the name of the documentary. And it's not using the N-word as most people know it. It's a different N-word we also can't say. And how am I supposed to describe to people the various words that can't be said if there's a

bunch of different words that start with the letter N? This is the problem. And so when I heard that story about you, I was like, well, how do you tell your employees don't say these words when you can't actually tell them what the word is? Well, I think there's no place for the word, period. The thing I like about what you're doing on the weekend is you work on your culture. You know, you're trying to change things and set an example and make the world a better place. And so anything that further divides our country, anything that doesn't really involve like kindness and thoughtfulness and consideration and collaborative alliances for our fellow man,

I think that should just be off the table because the media kind of thrives on fear. To your point, if the journalist, the media, would have done what you did, all you did is do a little homework. You know, you looked at the board cards. I read the stories and thought about it. Thought about it. And you got it right. I mean, I i can't believe it you're 32 years old um you weren't where you're at today back then and you nailed it you nailed it to a t what happened and if um journalists

really cared about their dignity and their integrity i think i think the approval rating right now on networks i think that 15 or or something. Oh, it's miserable. It's miserable. And I think it's because they're not honest. And I think the American people are tired of being lied to. But what I want to do with this situation is I want to find a way to emphasize forgiveness, pardon the unpardonable, forgive the unforgivable, and let everybody know that sometimes you're going to get a raw deal

and sometimes you're going to get kicked in the teeth. And that's not cool, especially in this situation, because the race thing is about it's pretty brutal to be painted in that box, especially on a false narrative. But if we can find a way for other folks to inspire them to get through their adversity, then that would be, to me, that would be the bang for a buck that I get out of going through all this. It is extremely challenging though. I mean when you have what we're seeing in schools, it's critical

race applied principles. They call it critical race praxis, CRP. We call it applied principles because the acronym is a little bit more accurate in my opinion. But you have them just going to children and they're teaching children to be racist. So yeah, I mean, we, if, if it's not, I agree with what you're saying, you know, we want to, we want to inspire people to be kind, to be critical thinkers, to improve themselves, to build a culture. People need to be responsible to a certain degree. We want to help each other, but we also got to have some responsibility. Well, what's happening now is

you try to be nice. You try to be forgiving. They take advantage of it. They come after you. I mean, take a look at exactly what happened to you. I mean, I understand what you're saying, you know, forgive the unforgivable or pardon the unpardonable. But the people that, you know, I guess conspired against you, they've learned no lesson. In fact, they've enriched themselves. So it sounds like, you mentioned this a second ago, that this ad agency, I think it was, right? They were recording you. They set you up. But that even within your own company, there were people who seemed to be working against you. Yeah, we had a couple of board members. Steve Ritchie was the CEO who was getting ready to get terminated. So he had to be part of this to set me up because he was going to get—

So you weren't the CEO? No, I wasn't the CEO. I was chairman of the board. Oh, okay, okay. I was wrong. Correction. Another gentleman, Mark Shapiro, who was head of governance, he wanted the marketing business. He knew that as long as I was chairman of the board and involved, that it was a conflict of interest for a board of directors to have an account, a marketing account. And, of course, when I got off the board, the first thing they did was gave Mark Shapiro the $40 million marketing deal, and he got a $10 million package. Wow.

So a complete violation of duty of loyalty. But we had a couple of board members that they had personal gain. The company was making a lot, a lot of money. And we had a washerman who owned laundry service. They had agency. He was good friends with Roger Goodell. Remember, I'm hammering Goodell in the paper going, Goodell, get your act together.

Roger Goodell is the commissioner of the NFL. I'm hammering him that, you know, you've got to get this solved to the players' and owners' satisfaction. So Goodell didn't like being called out on that. So had we got goodell we got washerman with laundry service uh steve richie with papa john's and and mark shapiro um they set me up um the rest of the board didn't do their due diligence they didn't do an investigation they went along with it and we end up um with a complete disaster that really hurt my employees. It hurt my franchisees very badly, and it hurt my community of Louisville, Kentucky. They left my hometown.

When I lost control, they left my hometown. So I'll be fine. We'll live to see another day. I've got a lot of things I'm working on I'm excited about. But a lot of good, hardworking people that wake up and woke up every day to make Papa John's great, they lost their jobs, and their families got hurt. And that's not cool. You know why I think the other board members didn't stand up for you?

They didn't want to appear in the news to be defending someone who was accused of racism. So it wasn't about doing an investigation. It was about, I'm not sticking my neck out and getting involved in this. We see what these people do when they go around smashing windows and starting fires. The last thing anyone wants to do is be on their radar yeah i think there was an element of cowardice to this i think the board members took the easy way out said okay we'll just pin all this on john we'll pin the upper on john we'll take the lazy way out and the easy way out and um you know um and to make john the hit guy make john the fall man that's what they did yeah i agree with that yep but that's okay but you know because and to make John the hit guy, make John the fall man. And that's what they did. Yeah, I agree with that. Yep.

But that's okay. But, you know, because you don't gain anywhere in life by being the victim. So, you know, they did it. You know, I got a two-inch violin. Can we play it? Let's play it for three seconds and get on with life because, you know, you've got to figure out a way to use this whole, I don't know if you want to call it an episode or a chapter in the book, whatever.

We've got to find a way to propel this and use this to our advantage to make society better. Were you freaking out when it all started happening? Shit, I didn't know what happened. I treat everybody with kindness and respect. I mean, we were raised so good with regard to respecting everybody, regardless of the skin color. That was just part of our family.

And so I knew it was BS. I knew it wasn't truthful, but I didn't understand how it happened. How do you take something, best place to work in Kentucky, making $160 million a year, we're growing, we just passed 5,000 stores, and how do you make it into this mess on a false narrative? And so I didn't really quite understand it. And then probably two or three months after this broke, it was like, you know, I think they set me up. I mean, really.

And then here it is three years later, we still can't get documents from Papa John's. We're still waiting on 13,000 documents. Three years later. That's how bad. So we have the setup, and now we have the cover-up. The next question is, whodunit? How far up the food chain does this go? Are you still suing?

Yeah, we have a litigation right now with laundry service, Casey Washington Laundry Service. And we're waiting on 13,000 documents. They've got six lawyers between the two of them, and they fought this for eight months. And Papa John's has fought the 220 now for two and a half years. So either they have something that's really bad or they're stringing us out. But if they have something that's not bad, they're sure doing a heck of a job hiding it from us. You said it was three months, right? You started to question whether you think that you got set up?

Well, the first thing you do in bed, you lay in bed every night and you cry. You go, wow, what the hell just happened? How am I going to get out of this? I mean, I just got painted as a racist. I mean, you just sit there and you don't know what to do because you're kind of brain dead. You're numb. Your brain is numb because you don't understand how they could take something that was that benign and anti-racist. It was a sensitivity training on what

not to say and then flip it leak remember forbes said he said the n-word but then what they didn't say is he said he never uses the n-word colonel sanders used it so they took it out of a context but it was probably five or six months into it i went okay, okay, this was a setup. And then we started putting the pieces together. Pizzas. I like that. That's pretty cute. Hopefully we won't get barred on YouTube for that one. Putting the pizzas together.

And then probably a year and a half, and it was like, okay. And now every piece, I've never seen it. Lawsuits, they do this. They go up and they go down. They go up and they go down. This lawsuit has been going on for 15 months. Every single thing that's happened has been to our benefit. So I think we've got a pretty ironclad case on what happened.

If we just get the other side to operate with a little transparency, we'll get to the bottom of it. Frankly, at the end of the day, all Papa John's has got to do is say he was set up. He's no history of treating anybody with less than the utmost respect and dignity. We're sorry John had to go through with this. He's the face of the brand. It's his name on the box. It's his recipe. It's his concept.

Let's all move on with our lives in a positive way. Unfortunately, the board of directors of Papa John's, is not, we talked about coward, does not have enough solid sense of self to take the hit and admit they didn't do a proper investigation, they made a huge mistake, they panicked, and they did a lot of damage to this brand. Panic, I wonder. I wonder. I mean, it sounds like a setup. It sounds like people wanted to make some money. And they did.

And then it sounds like the other people were just like, hey, I'm not sticking my neck out for this. Like I said, we see what happens with these extremists who go around with Molotov cocktails and crowbars and bats smashing windows and attacking people. That's scary. People are scared of what's going to happen. Yeah, well, let's get back on the positive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You take Coca-Cola, Delta. They need to be flying airplanes and making soft drinks. You know, Papa John's needs to be making pizzas. But when you have a weak board and they get this pressure from all these, you know, this political aspect and this group that's probably the silent, you know, or the loud. Squeaky wheel. Squeaky. Then they do silly things and they need to

fly airplanes and get people that are safe and sound and they need to make soda sody pop and papa john's needs to make pizza but some for some reason these these boards are so they they pretend like they're leaders in our community and they're put together and they have high integrity and dignity and they're really made like paper dolls. You know, any negative PR, they just fold like puppets. And I had a weak board and it cost me dearly. Yeah, I think there's Gen X maybe, I guess. Gen Xers and younger boomers are much more interested in no confrontation. And so now you have very loud, prominent activists.

They've found their voice online. They've found followers fighting for what they will call justice. And then you get board members who are like, look, I make a bunch of money. I don't want to be in the press. I'm not going to be involved, so I won't be. Yeah, 3% of the population causes 85% of the problems, you know three percent so it's at um that very boisterous small percent that tear things up tear buildings up tear cities up you know and and you know do crazy things um that cause the rest of us a lot of grief

politicians they i think i get you know the worst thing out of everything when i saw this story about you was that this is one of the most if you want to call out cancel culture, we'll talk I think you put cancel culture in the encyclopedia they show a picture of what happened to you and what happened to you. They didn't just get you fired, removed from your position they started going after your legacy.

There was, I think you had contributed to a university, is that what happened? They took your name down? Yes, four. Four universities. Which ones? UofL, UK, Ball State, and Purdue. So you had contributed to these universities that took your name off of these places? Well, we believe in voluntary exchange. We believe that when you go out and you buy a product or service, it's mutually beneficial to all parties.

That's what free markets do. So the curriculum that we set up in each university was free markets, voluntary exchange, entrepreneurship. And we were up to four universities. The left, and I don't want to make this political, but the left did not like us in the universities. And the group I went in with, and this was tens of millions of dollars to do this, we had two goals.

The first goal is to give the kids both sides of the coin. They hear about entitlement, how good, you know, big brother, big government it is. You know, if you're successful, that's not good. You don't have to be accountable. Big bureaucracy. We flipped it and said, okay, that's fine. If you want to believe that, you need to believe whatever, but you might want to look at look at entrepreneurship accountability self-respect

making a contribution uh earning uh saving getting ahead and then and so they the kids loved uh the entrepreneur program they really did and um whether they went this way or that way i don't care as long as they could see both sides of the coin that was goal number one goal number two was don't further divide the country the country's already divided this was five six years ago let's don't further divide the country and i really feel like we were accomplishing that goal and of course our terminology our nomenclature the left couldn't get on it because we were not there to divide we were there just to teach free markets and And so I think the left really had an issue with us going into these universities and teaching free markets, free enterprise, and entrepreneurship. Wow. Yeah. You were having a, I didn't even know that. I just saw the story

where it's like name was removed from school and I'm like, that's crazy. But now it sounds like you were actually having a very, very powerful impact on young people and teaching them personal responsibility. Yeah. The second year at UofL, out of 1,263 curriculums, our program was number four within two years. So the kids love entrepreneurship. They love hearing about free markets and freedoms in general and so when we were at four we wanted to go to 400 because we think small business is the backbone and the heartbeat of this country i mean 60 something percent of the new jobs are small business so we like micro dirty jobs yeah we like teaching vocations we like teaching trades

we like teaching entrepreneurship i even wanted the classroom on the front of the building school and then trades in the back. How do you build a house? How do you work on a truck? How do you do the technical part of a carburetor on a Toyota or whatever it is? But we actually wanted the school room adjacent to the workshop, a micro kind of deal, to teach these kids how to have a career, how to have a job so they don't get out of college and owe $150,000 in debt on student loans. Do you think that there was maybe a political component to what happened to you then? I mean, you've got special interests that don't want what you're teaching kids in these universities. They certainly ripped that out the moment they could. Well, you're asking the

conspiracy question. Well, I guess is the conspiracy beyond just being set up by people who want to make money? Was there a political component know i don't want to say anything i really don't have facts i know richie and shapiro were part of it i know washington style with laundry service were part of goodell was probably part of it how far up the food chain that goes uh washington's the head of the dnc in in la i don't really want to make that assumption i will say this i made a comment it says roger goodell needs to solve the nfl issues to the players and owner satisfaction less than 20 minutes that went viral that i was against the players kneeling i mean i'm like how did they take that that was a lie a lie benign innocuous and turn it into that I'm anti-kneeling.

And within one hour, we had like six million. It just blew up. So I'm kind of like, was that orchestrated? Well, have you ever heard of the phrase a standalone complex? Yeah, emergent. Yeah. So a lot of people, you know, conspiracy is a dirty word. And, yeah, I've got to be honest.

I'm fairly anti-conspiracy in a lot of ways because you need a lot of evidence to back up these big stretches. However, when you tell a story like that, that you said, you know, solve this to the players and the coaches' benefits. Is that what you said, to players and coaches? Goodell needs to solve this debacle to the owners' and players' satisfaction. Right. To take that and clearly take it out of context to make you look bad, a standalone complex would be when a bunch of people do something that effectively acts in concert to create the appearance of a conspiracy,

but they're actually just doing it independently. So if you had ten people who all stood up at the same time and yelled that they were fans of Papa John's, people would assume they orchestrated it. That would be a conspiracy, sort of. They came together and planned it at 10 o'clock. We're all going to stand up and shout, we like pizza. A standalone complex would be, seemingly by chance,

they all stood up at the same time, independent of each other for some reason. So when you see what happened to you, perhaps it doesn't need to be a conspiracy. It could just be that when people saw there was an opportunity to go after you, political components were like, now's our chance to get rid of these free enterprise programs and these universities, and so they did. I think that concept definitely could be applicable to my situation. For this to happen, all the stars had to align perfectly in the wrong way for me, and that could have happened.

That could have happened. Regarding building entrepreneurial skills for young people, what was your young entrepreneurial career like? Like when did you get your first job and what led you up to start making the pizzas? The greatest lesson I ever had was when I was eight. My grandfather had kind of like a farm,

miniature farm where we had tractors and mowers and equipment. And he'd go out and buy new equipment and tractors, but every once in a while it would break, and like the motor would break on the tractor. And he would look at me and say, fix it. And I said, fix it. Well, I'm eight years old.

I'm seven years old. I'm eight years old. So I'd tear the motor apart, tear the carburetor apart on his workbench, and sometimes I could get it back together and sometimes I couldn't. He didn't care. He wanted me to know how things worked. He wanted for me to know how to turn a wrench, to understand the engineering, the mechanics of how things really work.

That was by far. How do ecosystems work? How does the environment work? How does the weather work? How do political systems work? How does our our economy work how does our banking system work but that all came back when i was seven eight years old when he wasn't both he and my dad said it's okay to make a mistake you know you're not going to learn if you're not making mistakes now don't make the same mistake twice but an entrepreneur is um nothing uh but a big shot's nothing but a little shot that kept on shooting.

So just keep on shooting. Keep on trying new things and new innovations. Keep tinkering. Go ahead. You're being taught to think critically, to think independently, to be personally responsible. You tell that story, and I'm like, well, that makes perfect sense. You plant that seed, and here you are, this very successful businessman. And then you look at the school programs.

You said that there were two different programs, right? You wanted people to be able to see both sides. Yours was free enterprise. What was the other thing they were teaching? What was the other component? Big government, tax the rich, success is a bad thing, entitlements. The number one employer for history majors in the United States is Starbucks. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, they want to teach soul science. You know, I wanted to always teach hard science, arithmetic, you know, engineering. Veterinarian, for example, that would be a great career. How to build something. Architecture. You know, those are things that are hard scientists that you can actually do something with and have a real career. At UofL, we had 200 slots in our dentistry program, and we had demand for 3,000 dentists.

I'm like, we need more dentists. I mean, you know, we don't need more lawyers. We don't need more social science folks. We need more engineers. We need more architects. We need more dentists. I'm curious as to how this is happening, how you could have the program that espouses independence, individuality, entrepreneurship. That's the one that gets removed? I mean, that should be the resilient side of things, right?

You do have a way with turning things on their head. Let me chew on what you just said because you just did in real time what you did back in 2018. You're right. They threw me out on something I didn't say and the very thing that we're trying to produce was exactly what I didn't say. So that's kind of interesting. Well, what I mean is if you teach people to be responsible, independent, smart, cunning, and to be good people, to try and help others. How is it that these are the ideals that seem to be faltering? You know, particularly in this story, but in my experience, I think a lot of people are seeing it.

You tend to have the big government, you know, entitlements side becoming more and more prominent, gaining control of the institutions. Maybe there's something that being a good person misses. I'm not saying don't be a good person, but maybe when you're a good person, you overlook the fact that some people might be lying to you. Well, again, back to with your audience here on, you know, you've got to you've got to own your own BS. You've got to own your own nonsense. And so the question for the House is, I mean, I protected my board of directors with my life. I protected my employees with my life. i protected my board of directors with my life i protected my employees

with my life i protected my franchisees i mean i i made sure that nothing was going to happen to them and okay we we now established they want the 160 million they want the marketing business they want to you know so they want to get rid of john live with that okay um can we have a cup of coffee and say john you go we'll go. No conversation, no nothing. Not only do they want to get rid of me, they wanted a crucifixion. They wanted to, you know, they wanted to paint me in a racist. Now, that's evil. I mean, that is about as bad as you can do to a founder of a pizza company that did it by the book,

that played the long game and took everybody up with it. And the question for the House is is how come i didn't see that i had no inclination that this board of directors and this executive team would do something like this not even a witch that they were even capable of doing this and they did it they continue to do it and so what i've tried to get out of this is okay how can i use that for higher level of consciousness awareness why didn't i see it but then you got to flip that on its head and go i don't want to go around life going i got to worry about people screw me every second of the day so um as you can see we haven't quite reached

the forgive the unforgivable uh we're definitely off um i'm going to kill these people we're off that one which is where we're at back here literally um but it's uh it's a lot to take in it's it's a lot to overcome but we we to move on with the life we have to get to that that forgiveness stage we have to yeah it kind of feels like um people who are trying to be nice and do good are unsuspecting of you know what's going to come after them and the story you tell me about uh you know i know people who worked for Papa John's and said it was fantastic. I was reading some quotes where you were saying

that people got to get paid more, the minimum wage was too low. You basically talked about things that are fairly populist, right? Help for the little guy and for the working class. Sure enough, maybe, I don't know how to describe it, but maybe too nice.

Well, you understand, I don't know how to describe it, but you may be too nice, you know. Well, you understand, Papa John's and we did build a great company, but we also had great people. We had a great team. We really were more in the people business than the pizza business. It was a fantastic group of individuals. And that's how we got the thing over 5,000 stores. But I think you can't, you know, you, you just got to stay positive with this. And I think that if you take care of people, and you do the right thing, then sooner or later, you know, karma is karma is a real deal. I mean, karma, you know, what goes around comes around.

You're definitely right about forgiveness. I think we're about to enter the age of like more transparency, especially in government. And when we start changing our government, we're going to start finding all these crimes and criminals within the politicians. And it's going to be really... People are really going to want to punish them. But I think we have to forgive these people. Hillary Clinton's email scandals, for instance.

We've got to forgive these people and make sure that if we move forward as a society, it's all together. Otherwise, those rich people in the shadows are going to try and avoid getting caught and they're going to try and do damage to the people attempting to move the system forward. I'm full with you about this forgiveness era.

I mean, some people are really, really dead. Yeah, but it's not up to us to decide. In my opinion, I don't think we can do it if we don't do it together. All of us. As weird as it sounds. Horrible crimes. If there's no justice for horrible crimes, then people lose faith in the system because – I've already lost faith, man, because the justice is – And you don't bring it back by saying bad people can get away with bad things, but good people get punished.

You know the Ben Franklin quote, 100 guilty people better to escape than one innocent sufferer. I think that maybe that's 10,000 guilties should escape rather than one innocent sufferer. That is a hard question, man, because i understand what you're saying if we if we stay if we stay with the rage and the anger then we fall apart but if we allow people to get away with evil then you live in an evil society not in the future but for past crimes it's just an idea yeah i think i think you'll end up in an evil society. I think when people... We're already there, man. Right, and I don't think...

I don't know if there's a real simple solution to everything we're seeing. I mean, you know, it might be... I don't want to get too dark, but we saw a year of rioting. We saw... You know, I talked about this earlier on my other channel. 60 Secret Service agents injured at the White House

after left-wing groups pulled down the barricades, started fires in a Secret Service guard post, and in the church, 60 Secret Service officers injured. They get away with it. In fact, when Donald Trump was brought to the emergency bunker because of this extreme violence, the media mocked him and made fun of him. And now you have January 6th with those hearings today, and it's inverted completely. Now the officers are crying on camera. Now, of course, I think what happened on January 6th when you actually watch the footage of the violence is horrifying and wrong, and these people should be held accountable. The problem is you have a large group of people who see what just happened. They see 60 officers can be hurt, the president can

be ushered to the bunker and the media will laugh. But then you get, you know, a few hours on one day with another riot, which is also bad. And they're holding congressional hearings about it. This is going to shatter regular people when they're looking at what's going on. And they're going to say, I'm not playing this game anymore. And what I mean by that, I think a lot of people are going to start becoming just completely noncompliant in the sense that they have no confidence in the system. If someone says, you know, if the government issues a mandate due X, they're going to be like,

why should I care? You know, it's a free for all on this side and nothing. I'm just not going to engage anymore. This is going to lead people to feel like the system doesn't work. They are insecure in their person and their belongings and their family. And it's going to destabilize the country unless there is justice. And that means, by all means, justice for the people on January 6th. So those rioters who were fighting with cops and attacking them will get charged for their crimes. But it also means all of the rioters from the past year have to be charged and held accountable as well.

Otherwise, you have anarcho-tyranny. The government will not enforce the rights that affect the small guy and the small businesses. They'll even ignore it when they come to the White House and the president is ushered downstairs. But then when it's their side, they'll enforce everything with an iron fist. That's going to shatter people. Whether you like Trump or not, Trump does love America. He does understand entrepreneurship. And both sides of the aisle, all those guys are on the take.

You know, Mitch McConnell, been in office for 30 years. He's worth $35 million. Pelosi's worth, how do you get $35? How do you get a, I mean, so they're all, Trump's the only one that's not on the take. He's the only one. They had to get rid of him. And, yeah, they finally did. But the, whether you're left or right, the people that wake up every day and make our country great,

they're just trying to make the right decision for their families. They really, you know, sometimes I get on my, I have friends both sides, and I love them both. Sometimes I argue with my friends on my left because I'm going, I think your ideology overrides your intelligence, you know, because that doesn't make any sense. But it's a healthy dialogue back and forth. The progressive elite at the top will scorch this earth. They do not care about humanity. And that's the piece that upsets me is that I don't think that the folks at the elite progressive left top have any regard for the working men and working women.

They refer to them as mouths. It's another mouth we've got to worry about. Mouths. Mouths, yeah. Another mouth we've got to worry about. Wow, that's creepy, man. They're wild animals. You know what I think, though?

I think they view it as utilitarian. Their whole view is if we have a million people and we do something that benefits 900,000 and sacrifices 100, who cares? It's for the good of the collective. So they're willing to sacrifice the individual, not protect those rights. It's part of why centralized planning of governance doesn't function because they're out of touch. They can't identify with the crowd. Also because it foments revolutions. If you keep sacrificing different groups or ignoring their needs because your

focus is solely on the greater collective, you end up with all of these different organizations around you saying we're tired of being mistreated. When you focus on the individual, when you guarantee the individual's rights, you have a whole grassroots network moving all the way up from people who are like, I feel like my rights are being protected. So as the progressive left starts to gain more and more power, starts to dictate what the Democrats do, you start seeing more utilitarianism. And in turn, you're going to see more and more chaos. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why they left the leave the borders open in Mexico,

because those folks are going to come over and vote left. And they shut the borders to Cuba, because those folks are going to come over and say, you don't want to have what we just had for 30 years. Yeah, that's right. Hypocrisy is pretty unbelievable in those two border situations. We saw in Miami what the pollsters were saying was safe Democrat went Republican because the people in Miami know exactly what these words mean. The people in South Texas are actually experiencing the problem of the illegal immigration. But I will issue a partial clarification or partial correction. These people don't need to come and vote left.

You know, there's a lot of people who say that if, you know, illegal immigrants come across the southern border, they will become citizens, immediately vote. That's why Democrats want naturalization. But the census doesn't ask you if you're a citizen. So when a million people come across the border this year already, they can place these people in certain areas. Then on the census, how many people live here?

And that will affect the amount of electoral votes that area will have. I think it was the Heritage Foundation said that California gets one extra electoral vote based on their illegal immigration. Even if these people don't vote because they can't, because they're not citizens, it still is more power in the electoral process for these groups. Now, if they do, it's also more congressional seats. It's not just the presidential vote. You will get a congressional seat based on people who are not citizens. So, yeah.

I've got to come clean. I've never put together that illegal immigration can change the electoral vote. I've never put that together. That's pretty interesting. Tim just casually mentioned it to me like a month ago, and it's been like ringing in my head ever since. It's insane. Well, a lot of conservatives don't seem to realize that either. But you do have the Heritage Foundation, which mentioned, you know, it's like one.

So it's not like the apocalypse. But, hey, that's a free precedent. It's a free congressional seat. So now I think California lost a seat. I'm not sure. I think New York did. So there are changes happening. But Donald Trump was trying to get the citizenship question on the census for this reason, so that people who are not citizens

would say they're not a citizen, and then you could have better representation for American citizens. Democrats would lose a decent amount of power percentage-wise if that were to happen. So, of course, it was blocked and thrown out. And what does that mean? It means that you could be a taxpaying American. You could be born here. You could follow all the rules.

You got student loans. You were told to go to college. You're struggling to find work. You end up as a history major working at Starbucks. You pay your taxes, but you're not getting health care. You get sick. You go to the hospital. They charge you 10 grand. You don't understand why this is happening. Unfortunately for many of these people, you have the Pied Piper of the progressive left telling them the real problem is not that they've opened the borders or that they've destroyed industry. The real problem is the industry itself. So what happens when you have people who instead of saying, hey, wait a minute, maybe it's a problem that a million people this year crossed our border welcomed right in by Joe Biden.

I mean, that is absolutely shocking. You see these videos. There's a video that went viral like a week ago. The border gate is open. People just walk on through, walk right up to a CBP vehicle, hop on in and get taken off. Then we learned there was a whistleblower, two whistleblowers, I believe. Footage was released. Do you know the Biden administration is smuggling actually human trafficking migrant children on planes into states like Tennessee? This was one of the most shocking things I'd ever seen. I couldn't believe it. When you have, and they're doing it out of military bases, out of, I believe, military bases,

the Biden administration, these are videos that have been published. You see them taking kids, putting them on planes. They flew to Tennessee and then just released them into community centers. Republican politicians, they were shocked. Why is this happening? They are bringing, they're giving themselves more power. Now, look, I got tremendous respect. I say this all the time. I have a thousand times more respect for the illegal immigrants who come to this country, believing that this is their opportunity for freedom and opportunity than I do for the progressive left that come out and say America is evil and racist and it's a hellscape. That's just not true. But a system cannot be maintained when you have a million people just come in. Economies are not infinite bubbles of free resources. Economies have ebbs and flows. They have balances. There's supply and there's demand. So if you have a massive influx of a

million workers or people looking for work, at the same time you have massive unemployment and labor shortages i mean you're you're you're adding more problems to the mix and we've got to solve them well you know 1892 ellis island that's how we all you know most of our our grandfathers and great-grandfathers got over here and they had a process you know and um you know i think we we want folks to come to america we just want a process to get them in and get them in legally. And I think that if we did in 1892, we should be able to do it today. I agree. Yeah, I often say that a lot of people need to realize this, too. People are critical of immigration.

When the people immigrate here legally, we are getting the best. You know, these people who are leaving Nigeria and come here and they're extremely successful because we are getting passionate individuals who are like, I'm going to have that dream. The challenge, I suppose, is the people who are jumping the line. We don't know who they are. We don't know where they go. I mean, Biden is basically just shuffling them through and dropping them off. We need to be able to make sure people survive, people flourish, and that a rising tide raises all ships. I'm thinking about vertical farming because with this influx of people, and like you said, they consider the mouths to feed. Have you followed like the – it's called the phenomenon of vertical farming?

Like Aero Farms, I think, in Jersey is the largest indoor vertical farm where they like grow greens. You can really only grow green vegetables like leafy greens. The roots grow through this mesh hanging hanging and then you spray it with water and nutrient water and they get they can produce tens of thousands of pounds of lettuce you know so you're saying you think we'll be able to feed everybody well maybe but it's just green vegetables it's not like did you guys ever source indoor vertical farming food with papa john's we looked at the organic route no way with 5 000 stores now we could have done that on a regional basis but we had um a heck of a time and spent over 100 million bucks a year just getting the chemicals out of the

ingredients that in itself was an act of god i want and i want to stress something to the people listening they may they may be thinking to themselves what is ian talking about we're talking about migration i was talking about farms but it was a really good point. Do we, can we keep just making more and more food, especially when there's a, you mentioned something that's really interesting. I hear this. You're saying with 5,000 stores, it was difficult to do organic, trying to get the chemicals out of the food. How do we, as this wealthy nation, support a million people coming in? You know, what's funny is when it comes to the climate change stuff, they say America is one it comes to the climate change stuff, they say America is one of the biggest polluters.

Well, then the last thing we need is a million people coming in and adding to that. Yeah, this really hits home with me. This is near and dear to my heart because the next whatever, next Papa John's I do or whatever, the four criteria, it has to be in my soul. It has to be something that I breathe and really feel you know sacred has to be better for humanity has to make humanity better I mean the pizzas was great that's good run brings friends and family together but and then sustainable you know I'm going to be feeding this thing and then scalable I like big things and one two of the big

problems we have in this country is pharmaceuticals. They don't know the side effects of all these drugs. I'm not sure they know the effects of one when you mix two or three together. And the food supply is controlled by five processors, basically, and five seed companies. And they're destroying our soil, destroying our atmosphere. I mean, the organic soil is what absorbs a lot of that co2 in the atmosphere so monumental tasks how do you how do you get people off the pharmaceuticals and how do you get you know get the food supply you know back where it's at then you go to water and then then

you go to sleep you know that's an aura ring so those are those would be the three or four things i would want to get done with humanity but I guess you just start one piece at a time and just build up like you were talking about up in the Northeast. Did you say something about the ring? Yeah, this is an aura ring. It measures your sleep. Oh. If you're not sleeping good at night, yeah, the body recovers mentally, emotionally, physically,

all your organs at night, especially in your deep sleep. So this is modest. It's $300. There's no monthly fee. It's aura. It's like a Bluetooth thing for your phone or something? Yeah put it up it tells you what you know wow i can pull up my sleep last night oh cool what last night was at 86 i have a watch that does that but like what am i supposed to wear my watch in bed it's the weirdest thing i'm like i gotta charge it right

yeah this was last night's sleep what does it say what what metrics does that give you 86 sleep eight hours nine minutes 88 but here's what you want to look for is your deep sleep was an hour 43 and your REM sleep was an hour and seven minutes wow is that good or bad oh that's at 86 anything over even anything over 76 is out of 100 good once you get in the 90s, it's hard to do. But this is really good for sleep. It'll give you a pulse all day. You'll read out your exercises. I'm up to 18,000 steps a day.

But your watch will do better than this for your steps during the day, your heart rate, your cycling, et cetera. But this is really good for your sleep. Oh, wow. Yeah. Talking about the universities, we were talking about the program to teach people, free market, and then the big government side.

We opened this podcast talking about these kids who are being indoctrinated. They're being told they can't succeed because of their race, things like that. And I'm worried that this is going to teach a generation not to try. They can't be successful and will make them dependent. So, you know, when you were telling the story about how you have this college program, I mean, they're going to the grade schools right now.

I'm curious what you think about, you know, what our kids are going through and what do you think is going to happen with that? I'm worried, as we talked about. My focus is those four attributes, you know, we talked about. And I want it to be under 40 because between 15 and 40, those generations, you've got processed food. You've got social media. You've got Internet. You've got all this technology. You've got all these technical devices around.

You've got pharmaceuticals. You've got super high anxiety. You've got a little bit of deterioration of the family. I'm really worried about that demographics. And when I hear critical race theory, the law of unintended consequences here are, you know, there's going to be tentacles going every which way. I'm worried that's actually going to hurt the black community more than it's going to help them. Oh, I agree. There's a viral video right now where this um there's there's this a black father and it's i think

it's actually one of the best criticisms of the critic of the critical race applied principles so theory would be just uh the academic literature and the applied principles would be what they actually tell the kids and what they implement and this is a father who says he just very politely says hey you know uh my my kids came home and they were very scared. And they said that you talked about slavery and Jim Crow, but nothing in between. I'd appreciate it if you just, you know, let my kids be kids and grow up a little bit because I want them to be the best they can be. But they're being told they can't. So, you know, and that was basically it. Very calm, not this rage filled.

How dare you? It was him just being like, look, my kids are freaking out, and can we just let them be kids for a minute? And then I'm like, I hear you, man. Yes, kids. What I don't like about what's happening in these schools and what worries me is that we had this story the other day of fourth graders being told to go through this critical race, applied principles packet and answer all these questions. And they tell the white kids that you're oppressors, that you're evil, you know, that, you know, you need to recognize what you've done and your ancestors, you know, the sins of the fathers are yours. And then they tell the children who are not white that you can't succeed because of your

race and because of these things. What's going to happen to a kid who's told they can't succeed? They're going to say when they fail, when they when they stumble and fall at their knee, they're going to look at the crack in the ground and say, that's the fault of the white man who made the sidewalk, not me for not paying attention. If you go through life that way, refusing to acknowledge where you have made a mistake, how could you ever possibly improve? You can't.

Well, this whole past thing is a problem. If you take two siblings that come out of an alcoholic family, one grows up and drinks themselves to death. The other one grows up and is the CEO or the president or whatever to fortune and fame. And so you ask the one that eventually drank and said, well, why did you drink so much? He said, well, because my parents drank all the time. And then you ask the other sibling that went to the top, why didn't you drink? And they said, well, I didn't drink because my parents drank, and I want to be like my parents. The point of that is the past doesn't make the future.

The future makes the past. This living in the past, you've got to acknowledge it. You've got to learn from it. But we can't be worrying about things that happened two, three, four, five, 600 years ago. We need to identify what's going on right now and plan for a bright future for all of us. Yeah, I think there's a lot of powerful political interests who recognize grievances make money. Media outlets realize, hey, if we can say something that's shocking and freak people out we're going to get paid and then there are special political interests say we will get votes

whether it's votes or cash there's power to be had in fanning the flames of this stuff well there's money everywhere that's you know the medical system academia that means just a big money machine the pharmaceuticals we talked about the big ones they give in lobbyists, the food process. So all of it gets back to follow the money for sure. But at the end of the day, principles always are more powerful than force. And good always supersedes evil. We just got to hang on to it. There are just some bad people who think – I think it's a lack of empathy in a sense.

They don't care what happens to other people perhaps it's a combination of utilitarianism and nihilism or callousness or some measure of each you know individual idea existing within people one of my favorite stories i tell people is this back when i was uh you know growing up in chicago there was there were people who would you know sell pot right and it was like a really risky thing to do you know what i mean you might make money doing it, but it's super illegal. And I remember meeting some guy and he was talking about how people were really dumb.

He's like, man, you get people in this neighborhood, they're so stupid. You know why? They sell dope, they're selling pot. Why would you do that? And then I was like, what do you mean? They're trying to make money and it's like an easy way to make money.

He's like, no, it isn't. He's like, you know what I do? He's like, I call local venues. I ask them what bands are playing this weekend, Friday or Saturday. I call the band and say, hey, I call local venues. I ask them what bands are playing this weekend, Friday or Saturday. I call the band and say, hey, I'm going to make shirts for you to sell to your audience and I'll take 20%. And they say, okay.

And then you go to a print shop. He'd spend a couple hundred bucks on shirts, sell them all out to this band's fans, make himself a couple of grand in a weekend, totally legally. And he was like, I make more money working one day out of the week than all of these people selling dope. Why are they doing it? They're not thinking. They're being told lies.

They're being told it's an easy way to make money. It's not true, man. There's better ways to make money. So I bring this up because there's a lot of people who are grifting, who are manipulating, who are trying to make a quick buck. But there's really easy ways to make legitimate money if you just think and you work hard. Well, you know, back to this board of directors. I mean, you can talk about what they did evil this and you know the other and just how wrong and it's horrific but it's it's

their problem it's not my problem all i can do every day is wake up and and put the best version of john ford that i can put forward and as long as i'm better myself and i'm better than the people around me then hopefully that will spread a lot better and a lot more poignant and a lot more graceful than people that are doing wrong. I believe that. So when we had people from your crew show up, we also had a bunch of free – you sent us some pizzas. Right. So we're downstairs and Papa John's Pizza shows up.

I was told by some of the people who are working with you that you can – they were like, oh, send him a picture. He will point out everything that's wrong with the pizzas and at first i was like do you mean like the the since he left they've ruined the pizzas no no just like the pizzas aren't perfect right so so actually one of the first things you do is you come in you're like let me take a look and then you point it out you know here's where they made mistakes this should have done this this should have been better i only bring this up because you mentioned there was a bonus thing that you had that you were you were paying out a decent amount of the profits and

bonuses to your staff. That's true? Right. Well, the guest experience can't exceed the employee's experience. If the employee's having a miserable day at work, they're going to take it out on the guest. So we always put the employees employees first and a big part of that was we made them feel like owners and we did that through profit sharing and if you got the product right and you got the service right and you had a good attitude usually the customer was pretty happy so we we figured out how to measure that we put out a great pizza and when they got it right and they with good service and good attitude then we paid in bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars so our employees

not only were they getting promotions and getting raises they were getting huge bonuses and so that was what i call a win win win win win was there a percentage that you allocated to this well the manager for for example or 20 percent but it goes right up from the manager right up the supervisor right up even the people in the office the executives all get paid it's another thing we did we had the bonus system aligned from top to bottom so most corporations the guy not only at the top gets his four five six seven million bucks and the people at the bottom getting taken advantage of which is immoral it's unethical we made it so that the guy at the top couldn't get a bonus unless the folks doing the heavy lifting at store level got a bonus. So the bonus system had a total alignment, total integrity.

And that was one of the most powerful things we did is bonus from bottom to top. Does that system still exist after you've left? No. The first two things they did when I left was they took out the measurement system. So if you don't measure it, they're not going to do it. What was that measurement system? Measurement meant the quality, which you just alluded to, the 10-point scale and the quality of the product, how long it took to get the pizza there, how many times the phone rang, did the driver have a hat on,

did the driver smile, that kind of thing. The measurement system, the matrix to measure the quality and what we call demonstrable value, which is basically the customer experience. And the second thing they took out was the principles we really are big on principles and we think you got to have core values every company has core values FedEx is going to have different core values than GM and GM is going to have different core values than Papa John's core values are nice and they're pretty, you know, specific to whatever company, but principles are universal. So mutual respect, kindness, thoughtfulness, collaborative alliances, win-win-win, authenticity,

those are all like gravity. They're just there. And you can fight principles all you want, but principles, like gravity, sooner or later are going to win. So we built the company on principles and then core values and then measurement system on quality. And it was very, very powerful. But that's the things they took out the first because those are the hardest things to do. How did it start? Well, real quick, to follow up on this point, the reason I brought this up is that Bernie Sanders proposed 20% stock sharing with the workers

so that when profits come in, a quarter of the profits are divvied up and then sent with with the workers so that when profits come in a quarter the profits are divvied up and then sent out to the workers it's fascinating to me that you know i've heard uh quotes from you about minimum wage being too low we you're talking now about this bonus structure and it sounds like a lot of the things the left claims to want you are actually doing chick-fil-a gives half the money to their managers. Half the profits go to the store manager. So I'm big on ownership and I'm big on splitting the pie up. If you give the employees, say you're making a hundred thousand bucks a year and you give the employees 30,000 of it, you know, believe it or not, within a year or two, they're going to have that number up to 140 or 160. Yeah. They want to make money i know and so that 70 of a hundred

is that if you had 100 100 within two or three years the 70 of the number is going to be bigger number so yeah it compounds itself for sure chick chick-fil-a they pay their staff really well also right they do everything well i mean there's a there's their um principle centered i don't like to get too much into religion but they they're definitely spiritual. You know, they obey universal laws and universal truths. They're very consistent. They're family-run, so they can play the long game. And they take care of their people, and they love America, and they love humanity. They were the one company that we always wanted to be like, Chick-fil-A.

Wow. In the very beginning, when you spun up Papa John's, you had one restaurant? Yes. What year was that? Broom Closet was 84. The first freestanding building was 1985. And you had, did you lay out principles then? Hold on, Broom Closet?

Yeah, we were in the Broom Closet, the old man's tavern. Nice. We had $5 pizzas in the Broom Closet, 50 cent beers in the front, and a dollar Big Burger on the side. Was it like the similar ingredients as to what you used as the years went on, or did you kind of tweak the— We always really did have good integrity with ingredients. We didn't have the ingredients when we started off with that we had when I left in 18, because we didn't have the money to get rid of all the chemicals and some of the other things.

But we had the fresh-back sauce. We ground the own cheese. We had the Mun the monster mozzarella blend we made our own dough so it was it was a good pie from the get-go did you freeze the dough how old were you in the room like we'll start from the broom closet how old were you when you were doing this broom closet in the tavern broom closet was 84 so i would have been 22 22 so you started making pizzas as part of this tavern. How did that become a freestanding building? We're in the broom closet, and we're in there for a couple months. And we're doing well in the bar. We're selling 50-cent beers, and we're doing these dollar McBurgers,

and we're doing real well. And so we start selling these $5 pizzas on the back, and we do $10 a day, and then we do $100. So one Tuesday, we did $200 on a Tuesday in this broom closet. My brother and I were jumping up and down because we thought we were rich. And when I left, we'd do $20 million a day and couldn't pay our bills. But anyway, we really thought $200, you know, how in the world can you spend all that money? And then we got that broom closet up to about $3,000.

And so there was an old KFC. The original KFC in Jeffersonville was adjacent to Mixed Lounge. So we actually took that space over and built a dining room, a big kitchen, and built a freestanding building right next to Mixed Lounge. The business went from $3,000 a week to $9,000 in two weeks. Wow. And I went, heck. Didn't cuss.

Heck, if you put a sign on the front door, it really helps your marketing. So we didn't have a sign on the front door. So we tripled our business by just putting a Papa John's sign on the front door. Was that, you said 3,000 to 9,000. Was that after expenditures of the new place, like rent? That was just sales, weekly sales. We tripled our sales. You do everything off your sales in the restaurant business. Now, now, now hold on there a minute. You do everything off your sales in the restaurant business. Now, hold on there a minute. You said it was called Papa John's right away?

Uh-huh. And it was named after you? Uh-huh. And how old were you, 22? 22. You were not a father, were you? No. It's all built on a lie, isn't it?

Well, you don't have to be French to be a good lover. I'm just kidding. Come on. Yeah, they told me to put equity on my resume when I was an actor, non-equity. And they're like, this way you'll get hired in equity because they think you're already equity. And then when they hire you, they'll actually pay for you to become equity. Hey, there you go. Age-old reasoning. So let's walk through this then.

So you got one store, $9,000 a week, you said. Was there a moment where you realized that it was taking off and you were going to be very successful? We're doing $9,000 a week. And there's a Domino's about two miles down the road in Grant Plaza. So I drive down, and you've got to understand, I'm 22. I'm pumped. You know, we're killing it at Mick's. We're killing it with the beer, killing it with the pool tables,

killing it with the Mick burger, and now we're killing it with the pizza. So we're having a big time. We're 22, 23 years old in Jeffersonville, Indiana, making $130,000 a year. Wow. Selling $5 pizzas and 50-cent beers. I walk in walk in this dominoes i look at the manager and i said what are you doing a week he said yeah i'm doing i'm doing five five fifty five six thousand a week and i looked at him and so we're doing nine thousand and i turned around and walked out of that dominoes and i thought if i can beat them in jervisville indiana i can beat them in the whole world wow i'm 20 but this time we had our own building this would have been 85 so i'd have been 23 i'm 23 years old and i thought like that i thought we can we can we can we can rule the

world we can beat them in jeffersonville the pizza world i know we thought that way i mean i look back and i go man i really was crazy you, so, so yeah, walk us through where you end up. What was your second location? How did that, how did, how did that come to be? Well, the first door had in-house dining, mozzarella sticks, zucchini, salads, mug of beer if you wanted it. And the consumers didn't like the dining room. They liked it delivered. And the dining room was all the expense and the the capital outlay so the second store we went to the formula put a hundred thousand in to build it do ten thousand a week in sales make ten percent profits with a thousand dollar month rent and that formula got us to about store 20 or 25

which would have been 18 1989 1990 and then from there we just kept getting a little bit better and kept growing that top line and then as i said went public in june of 93 did uh did domino's have a dining room too no no so you you were actually starting off as like a traditional neighborhood pizza restaurant or italian restaurant i guess well you always have to listen to the customer you know it's like marketing everybody's a marketing genius because but the problem with that is it's inside out thinking you don't need to think about marketing from inside out you need to think about it from the customer's perspective, from the prospect's perspective. And so the customer was telling us they like our pizza delivered. They want it carried out and delivered.

They don't want to sit down and eat it at the store. So you've got to listen to your customer. And so we did, and we got rid of the dining room. What was, like, the ingredient sourcing experience like from the first restaurant on? How did you start advancing them well we knew what sauce we wanted um we had the recipes on the dough uh we knew how to grind the cheese from the very beginning yeah because i'd made pizzas at rocky's when i was 15 i'd worked at greek's pizzeria worked at domino's we were familiar with kroll's bakery and some of their baking

techniques so we had a pretty good formula for the pizza early on um and we just we just ran we went around and took the best from everybody the best sauce the best cheese the best box the best whatever and took all that and combined it into it so we basically stole all the best uh recipes ingredients ideas from all the competition and just tried to combine it into one concept the garlic sauce was pretty groundbreaking because nobody really a lot of other restaurants i don't think they did that did they no we um there was an independent pizzeria over in new albany and um they had the garlic sauce um and i just thought that was a neat idea to put the salt the dough in the garlic sauce the you know the crust and dip it and so we started that and we got what we did. We took butter and put it in a tube, heated it up, took the tube, and then filled these little cups up.

And the problem is that butter would go everywhere. The whole store would be slick with butter. So store number three, we took the butter out. And the consumer went crazy. I want my butter. I want butter. So we were forced to. So the big thing with the butter is how do you manufacture that butter and get that lid to stay on?

And so that was a patent to get that done. Oh, wow. And so when we finally left, we were selling a million pizzas a day. And so those butters are like $0.08 a piece. So our butter bill was, I don't know, $30 million a year. So it was a crazy number. $0.08 to manufacture. It was a crazy number what it was.

Was that in 2018? Well, let's run the math so we know we're selling over 300 million pizzas a year and we know that those butters i think those butters are 10 cents it's been a while so that's that's 30 million bucks on butters but i mean that's gonna be a ballpark now that may be a little low that's going to be close i would imagine they enhanced the value of the pizza by 30 that maybe is a large number, maybe 15%. But, I mean, 10 cents or 20% value. The butters and the pepperoncinis were just kind of our way to say thank you. This is interesting.

Pepperoncinis are actually growing in the backyard in Greece. Little farmers, they put the little pails out and people come by and pick them up. And we started putting a couple of pepperoncinis in every box. And it and it got to be 1996 97 and there was a shortage on pepperoncinis the price of pepperoncinis per bushel went up fourfold because we were using too too many pepperoncinis but i i love that you know that's the best part you get you get the garlic the garlic was it a garlic butter sauce and the pepperoncinis garlic butter i always I always ask for extra peppers, man. I love them. Just eat them with the pizza.

I have to ask. I'm being pressured to ask this by outside sources. What happened with putting soy into your pizza? I guess there was some conversation about that going back a couple years, I guess. I don't really know. I'm really not really up to date on soy. Some of the oils that we use on the dough machines could be soybean-based. But I don't know if there's a lot of soybeans.

Soybeans are used for fillers. We didn't use a lot of fillers, if any. Okay. But remember, it's been five years since I've been in there, so I'm not sure what they're putting in it. Interesting. How about soy? So because we do hard-hitting journalism here at TimCast.com,

I actually want to pull up these ingredients. Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Papa John's. So your slogan was better ingredients, better pizza. We order pizza all the time. We've got a ton of people working here now. It's growing by the day. And so I frequently just try and get everybody some food. We bring it in, and we have these sit-down meetings kind of things we do.

Everybody sits down. It's like a family dinner, but for the staff. And so we'll do pizza. We've ordered pizza before. I won't order pizza ever again. I looked up their ingredients. I want to show people something that's interesting to me. We got the ingredients from Domino's.com.

I just Googled this, all right? I got their Brooklyn, their handmade pan crust, their hand-tossed crust, because, again, hard-hitting journalism, right? This is the stuff you guys really want to know about. I look at their hand-tossed crust, and it's got maltodextrin. It's got dough conditioners, sodium, stereoylacetate, enzyme calcium sulfate, ascorbic acid, vitamin C, which is vitamin C, calcium phosphate, L-cysteine, yeast, cornmeal. They mention they break down what enriched flour is and what's in it. So folic acid and stuff like that. But I

noticed there's these dough conditioners. I don't know what that is. That's potassium bromate. But they're not calling it potassium bromate anymore because they use it in yoga mats. What? Yeah, it's a chemical that's in yoga mats that they put in bread as a treatment. It's disgusting. Well, hold on. It's illegal in Europe. Let me pull up

the weirdest thing. I looked up pizza, right? So this is nutritionics.com Pizza Hut ingredient search. Maybe this is wrong because it's not PizzaHut.com. But they say in their crust, they do enriched flour. Then they say, okay, so where's that? Okay, water, yeast, soybean oil.

And then it contains vital wheat, gluten, sugar, enzymes, ascorbic acid, sucralose, pan oil, soybean oil, TBHQ added to protect freshnessic acid sucralose pan oil soybean oil tbhq added to protect freshness sucralose is splendid it's an artificial sweetener they're putting a fake artificial i don't i don't i don't like drinking that stuff i don't like eating it that was really weird to me and then i look up uh papa john's and it's it's unbleached enriched wheat flour so that's used by the ones in rich and then says sugar, soybean oil, salt, yeast.

The ingredients list on Papa John's, it's like. I think it's soybean oil. That's what I want to ask about. I've been using olive oil. That's why I had to bring this up because Lydia asked about soybean oil. When I did live, we did have olive oil on the dough. That was one thing they took out. And it didn't have 100% olive oil, but we did put olive oil in.

And they didn't, it was one of the things, the corners they cut. But I'm didn't to hear they didn't cut more because remember this is now run for wall street this thing's run for eps this is not run for the employees or for the team members or for the quality of the product so um they're if they're doing if they're staying pretty clear with this um pretty clean with this that's a that's a real good thing to uphold that better ingredients better pizza promise. But did you always have soybean oil in it? We always had soybean or canola oil in the sauce. We always had some oils. Did you use different oils in the sauce?

Oh, yeah. The sauce uses olive oil. Olive oils are tough. And that's one of the things that you get what you pay for. The better quality oil, the more money it costs. The garlic butter, you can really cheat on the garlic butter and use a cheaper oil, but I think it really hurts the quality. Yeah, for sure.

But again, I've been out of the system for five years. I'm not exactly sure. Do you make pizza at the house now? Oh, yeah. I've got a pizza oven. Like a brick oven? I've got a pizza oven. Like a brick oven? I've got an oven from the Roman Empire. Columns from the Roman Empire, 300 A.D.

Yeah. So you come over. Next time you're on Louisville, come over. I'll make you some Papa John's pizza. Yeah, we should rock. I love making pizza. I do it from scratch. Do you do it all from scratch now? Do you get the tomatoes?

I usually go up to Papa John's and get some dough balls. It's so good. And you get some dough and some sauce. Then go back. It's a wood-burning, really heavy metal kind of outdoor oven. You know, it's not the conveyor oven, but it makes a pretty mean pie. Would they do wood-burning at Papa John's while you were there, or did you just use conventional ovens?

We played with that, but our volumes, we needed a conveyor oven just because of the volumes. But I'll give you an ingredient story. We went to hutchinson kansas to look at sausage and beef and when i went to the factory because i eat sausage john's favorites pepperoni sausage six cheese i was appalled at what they were putting in the sausage the hoof of the cow the face of the cow it was bad and i said no no no i went and we at the time probably had six seven hundred stores they said well, that's just the way we do it.

I go, it's not the way I'm going to do it. We're going to have the tenderloin, the good part of it. I had to wrestle with them for three or four months. And we were spending a lot of money to get them to get all the chemicals out and to use, you know, the best parts of the cow or the pig, you know, to make the product. And that took, you know to make make the make the make the product and that took that took you know some real doing so um the when we hired kids out of college these food scientists we tried to get them to learn how to take chemicals out and what you were just reading on that list these kids have been taught how to add stuff and they looked at me like i was crazy i said you know you we need to

get this stuff out of here because you no idea what it's doing to your stomach and to your evolutionary part of our system that doesn't know how to deal with all these chemicals. And we lost a lot of food scientists because they like putting stuff in. They like putting all those chemicals in and being kind of a witch's brew of chemicals to make up, you know, taste or, you know, to extend the product whatever and we said no we like to keep things real simple and if i can't read it in two or three you know four ingredients per ingredient and i can't pronounce it then i don't want it in the product and that that took some doing and that was over 100 million bucks a year when i left i don't know

if they're still doing it or not you would spend in it to get the stuff out was over over 100 million bucks to walk i thought so now there's two ways to look at this one is you want to get the stuff out was over over 100 million bucks to walk i thought so now there's two ways to look at this one is you want to keep the integrity of the better ingredients better pizza promise uh alive and well and healthy by walking the talk and walking the talk costs a lot of money the flip of that is processed foods may be addictive so we may be actually putting something in the product that wasn't as addictive as if you put the stuff in there. So we never got around to figuring out were people eating less Papa John's because it didn't have chemicals in it and wasn't addictive. But that was a tradeoff that we looked at.

Similar with social media. They have like slot machines where like they make you addicted to these social media platforms. And you want to get the likes. You know what scares me, man, is that Dave Thomas, Wendy's, he was very much a better ingredients kind of guy, or at least that's the way I remember I was a little kid. I remember going to Wendy's and they had a salad bar. But as soon as Dave Thomas passes, it goes Wall Street, right?

They want to make the profits, crank the profits up, crank the margins up, cut costs, cut corners, and then you end up with worse ingredients, worse burgers, right? Well, take KFC. KFC has had, at one time, great fried chicken. Average KFC does about a million-two in volume. The average Chick-fil-A does five million. So when you start running the business for Wall Street, you can have some short-term success,

but in the pizza category in particular, it's so hyper-competitive that if you're playing games with product quality and not really taking care of your employees, then sooner or later it's going to catch up with you pretty quick. I worked at Wendy's in 1980 when we used to patty the beef in the back and do everything by scratch. Please, I'm sorry. Oh, especially with bread. I mean, if you eat a bread with a preservative in it, you know it stays in your system. If you eat a pure bread,

flour, water, sugar, yeast, maybe some salt, definitely some salt, it passes through you almost like water. Your body just rips it through. I don't know if that's a good thing, Ian. You can eat so much more organic bread without

preservatives. You don't feel bad. Not yet. I'll tell you this. Remember that Popeye's chicken sandwich thing? They were trying to claim it was the greatest thing ever. There were people on social media being like, wow, it's better than Chick-fil-A.

And I was like, how is that possible? I went to Popeye's. I got the sandwich. I did not like it. I thought it was bad. It was a chicken sandwich, right? I don't want to say it was bad, but Chick-fil-A is really, really good. And, you know, whenever we go to Chick-fil-A, the service is great.

People are working really hard. Everything is clean and set up properly, and it's just like it's a well-oiled machine, and the food is always really fantastic. Yeah, that's the Cathy family. It was Truett, and he passed away a few years back, and then Stan and Bubba and the family do a tremendous job. But this processed food, I mean, 99.9% of the American population has a chemical addiction. It's called processed food.

And this processed food is very dangerous. And we're going to have to get our arms around it because it's a big culprit in some of the most prevalent and outrageous health issues we're having with our country. I heard this. It may be apocryphal, but I heard that after Colonel Sanders, like, franchised out and sold, he went back to go try the new KFC, and he said it was awful and disgusting or something like that. Maybe that's not true. I read that somewhere on the Internet.

I had something in the garlic butter at Papa John's, and it was, I don't know if it's a different recipe than it used to be, but it was hard, harder to digest than I remember it being. I cut sugar out of my diet though. That's good. Yeah. Good. The sugar, the sugar is probably worse than anything. Even the caffeine and alcohol, the sugar is pretty deadly, but yeah, the Colonel was fanatical about his chicken. Yeah. You know, he was funny. He was fanatical and finicky about and quirky about how he wanted that chicken cooked have you been like marinating any new recipes for other types of foods and no you just work at home just have fun

with it just fun garden i got i got an organic garden i play with i would i would you know when you came in and you were looking at the pizzas that was that were made by the local papa john's and you're like oh see there's a problem you were like, oh, see, there's a problem. And you're like pointing to the crust. I'm like, man, a pizza made by you must be the best pizza. That'd be fun. We should have a pizza-making contest. Well, I would love to come to the house. We'll do it with the Roman Empire columns with the pizza. Wow, nice.

But the first six months in the broom closet, I was convinced I was the only one that could make a pizza. Right. And so I made every single pizza. And that got old. And so, but that was kind of funny. But no, there's plenty of folks. There's great pizza makers at Papa John's. And there's a lot of them that can make a better pizza than I can.

But I do like making pizza. So you had to learn how to trust other people to make your ingredients. Similar to what Tim's doing with the TimCast brand. He's letting other people create shows on the network. What was that like? It's like letting somebody watch their child. I can only imagine a mother dropping or newborn off four, five, six months into the grandparents even. I mean, when it's your baby, it's sacred. So it was hard not to make ever pizza and not worry about ever pizza. What did you do? Have someone make one and then you tasted it and you were like, oh, yeah, it's good enough, close enough.

I can't tell. Probably wasn't quite that nice. It was probably like you didn't make it right. Let's start over. Let's get this right. You know, with growing this business, there's a lot of ideas I have for the figurative pizza, which is the content we're going to be producing. And it gets to a point where I'm talking to some of the new staff like, here's my vision,

here's what I think. Then they go off and do it. Then I've got to see the product and say, okay, here's my notes on it. And I definitely think, maybe this is a bit arrogant, but if I was the one always doing everything, it would be top tier, A++, but it's impossible. It's not possible to be doing every single aspect. You need to have people who can take that load off, who can start expanding the business. And you've got to do your best to find the talent and the drive and the passion for people

who want to do it and do it right. I can only imagine going to 5,000 stores. I couldn't even imagine that right now. Well, what's the saying? If the captain of the ship has to be the captain of the ship, he's really not a good captain. A good captain has plenty of people around him who can run the ship just as good as he can. The issue you've got is you have the producer, the manager, the supervisor, and the leader. Sorry, brother.

You're the producer. You're the one that makes the food. I mean, you're the one that's got – so you're stuck there, and then you're going to have to be the leader. But the manager and the supervision roles in between, that's something you can fill in. But you're always going to be the guy making the pizza. You're always going to be the guy in front of the mic. You just need to get other folks to do these other peripheral leadership capabilities.

Maybe. Maybe once we launch enough other shows, I'll be pushed into the back and maybe just... Look, you made your pizzas for some time and then you eventually were just running the company, but you still knew how to make the pizzas. I definitely think there will come a time where I think even within the next five years or so,

it's going to be impossible for me to do four hours per day of podcasting. It'll be impossible. And first of all, my throat's going to explode. But also it's just if this is going to be something bigger, better, more important, if we're going to be building culture, then my talents are better served helping other people start filling that role and expanding and helping make those changes. Inspiring people and having fun and making that content, I'll probably be better off doing that.

So one of the things, I used to work on Saturday and Sundays. I used to actually do podcast recordings. I decided to pull that back and focus on the vlog. And now it's much more relaxing, but it gives me more time. So I reduced the amount of content I did per day as well. I used to do three additional segments, which totaled about 50 minutes. Cut that out so I'd have time to go to the bank, to file paperwork, to deal with legal stuff. Otherwise, the company couldn't grow.

So I'd actually back away from making pizzas figuratively and, you know, to do the business. You know, if I was you, I would do the things that only you can do. You don't have a choice. Then there's the next column up that's the things that you could do, don't have a choice then there's the next column up that's the things that you could um you could do but somebody else could also do um and that's your call whether you do it

or not if you know and the third one is there's things you could maybe do but you shouldn't be doing you really need somebody else to do it and so i think you pick the parts you love you're not going to be able to i mean you got here this morning at 8 30 9 o'clock and we're going to get out of this thing at 11 you can't keep doing that you know you to. I mean, you got to hit it this morning at 830, 9 o'clock, and we're going to get out of this thing at 11. You can't keep doing that. You'll just burn out. So you've got to find the parts of this gig that you love and the time you want to do it. And find the time, find the thing you love,

and just work it to the bone. But it's got to be the things you want to do, in my opinion. Yeah, so I've got two different formats for the shows that we do here. We've got this, which is the conversation, the interviews, and we talk about news and stuff. It's TimCast IRL. And then I've got my two other channels, which are fairly similar, which is me sort of monologuing. That's the segment that you saw when I talked about your issue in 2018, the circumstances around what happened to you. And I really do think that in the next few years, this is going to be what ultimately survives and carries on.

Something that is longer, more in-depth, I think. You know, a lot of people have told me they like the in-depth breakdowns that I do, you know, personally. But I got to figure out a way to empower more people to this idea of freedom, individual responsibility, the free market stuff. To a certain extent, I wouldn't consider myself a laissez-faire capitalist. We've got to figure out how to grow that. And so what I'm trying to say is it'll probably come a time in a few years where those other channels take a backseat

and this becomes the primary flagship or whatever. But that's only going to be because we'll have 100, 200 employees producing movies, documentaries, other podcasts, and just have this massive network. And I'm going to have to do quality control, basically. So, you know, I could make a mean figurative podcast pizza, or I can teach people how to make, you know, and then oversee and make sure they're all doing it right. And we grow that business. Well, you know, just one meeting with you and two observations.

Remember, I did not see this board of directors doing what they did. I did not have that awareness. I think your gift is you have an acute ability to really be able to cut through things and really get to the heart of what's going on real quick. And you do it in a way that's actually very congenial. It's very nice, which is most guys that are that sharp usually are pretty poignant with their bite. But I think you've got a great way of just cutting through the nonsense and getting right to the meat of the matter. That's going to be a tough attribute to replace.

That's a gift. That's really a gift from God. It is, but I also think that I've made mistakes. I've trusted people I shouldn't trust. I've dealt with business. It is not easy. What's fascinating is the things I've already dealt with in trying to run and start business, the board of directors thing you didn't see coming,

but I have to imagine that, you know, throughout your career, you had a ton of beef and problems and, you know, complaints and threats of lawsuits. Well, good judgment comes from bad judgment. Bad judgment comes from bad experience. Really? Yeah. So it just, that comes, it just, you know. Again, the longer I live, the less I know I know.

I mean, it just, just when you think you're on top of life and you got it figured out, it's like raising kids. I mean, you're just not quite as good at it as you thought you were. You know, there's always something coming from somewhere, and that's just what makes life so interesting. Let's take some super chats. Talk to the audience. See if they got a lot of questions for you and a lot of positive statements, it seems. If you haven't already, smash that Like button, subscribe to this channel, and go to TimCast.com, become a member.

We'll have a bonus segment coming up just after the show. It usually goes up around 11 or so p.m. All right. Clayton Pahuna says, I ate 40 pizzas in the last 30 days. coming up just after the show usually usually goes up around 11 or so p.m all right so um clayton pahuna says i ate 40 pizzas in the last 30 days is that true did you eat 40 pizzas in 30 days no i didn't say i who's this by the way it's just a user clayton do you get to ask him where he's from or no no so they just they they comment and we get a list of their chats. Hey, Clayton, a little bit word trickery there. It doesn't say I ate 50 pizzas in 30 days.

It said I had 50 pizzas in 30 days. What we do is we have a system that I mentioned earlier, the measurement system, where we have secret shoppers and we order pizzas. And we order enough that we know through a bell-shaped curve with standard deviation who's doing what so we get enough orders I think in the last last nine months I've ordered about 900 Papa John pizzas because I own stock and I kind of watch what they're doing so I want to know what they're doing and as you saw earlier I can look at a pizza and tell you if they're doing it right or not so we didn't eat 50 pizzas in 30 days, but we did have 200 pizzas in two months.

Wow. Wow. Were you sampled? Sampled and looked at. Oh, okay. Maybe took a bite out of every. And the media spins it to make it seem like you're sitting there just guzzling pizzas. We got a lot of publicity off of it.

It just wasn't true. Rainer Chen says $10 in honor of Papa John. Maybe use it to buy Pizza Hut for later. Papa John, I'm a big fan. Love the Whopper, by the way. What? Mix it all in there. Wow.

Now, here's the important question. Kyle Miller says, John, do you still have your Z28 Camaro? I do. I bought that car when I was 15, washing dishes at Rocky Sub Pub for $1,600. I sold it October of 83 for $2,800 to get Daddy out of bankruptcy. And then I bought it back in 2009 for $275,000. I'm not a very good hog swapper here, so don't go in business with me. I'll not make you any money.

But, yeah, I have that in a vault in the basement of my house. Wow. Original car. That is an awesome story. Yeah. You had to sell it to help out your family. Is that what happened? Yeah.

Old man was banked, bankrupt and mixed lounge. And we sold it for $2,800 to get a load of beer to get us through the weekend. It's funny that in 83, 2,800 was more valuable than 150,000 or whatever it was in 2008. It's so relative, the amount of money you have and use. Well, they had a sucker on the line that wanted the car. Me.

Oh, yeah. Does it still drive? Oh, yeah. It's fast. It's 150, 160 miles. It's an 8283 quarter mile car. Yeah. It's a bad car.

And when you come over to make pizzas at the house, I'll take you for a ride in the car. I'll show you my 26 car museum that really only has three cars. I don't have a 26. They always say I have a 26 car museum in my basement. It's three cars. Are you getting more? All right. No,

it's all a home. All right. Release the craggle says heart your pizza. The name's Ben. Was my birthday the other day. Would you make my would make my year to have a quote? Have a Papa bless day from you. Papa John for president 2024. And this is who?

This is release the craggle. That's that's the release. The his name's Ben. Ben. Yeah. His name's Ben. And he would love for you to say have a Papa bless day. Ben, we love you. Papa John's. papa blessed day happy birthday all right let's see curious

mishap says yo papa john my second job ever was at a papa john's in 2014 legit my favorite pizza i'm actually a fan thank you for being the best you're my inspiration well thank you for that i appreciate that and you're my inspiration you're the ones that make Papa John's great every day. So thank you. All right, let's see. Dark soul says, Hey, Papa, my boss just got fired for private text messages. The company is crazy now been there for two years, and it's just trash. Well, hang in there with them. I'm not happy with them right now and i just you know we had two fundamental principles when we started out and that is take care of our people to go to our employees our team members or what makes papa john's great and take care of our product and

last a couple years i feel like we lost our way with those two attributes but i'm pounding on the board of directors pretty hard. They know how I feel about this. And, um, you know, like I say, it's my name on the door. It's my recipe and I founded it. And hopefully sooner or later,

they'll, they'll listen to me right now with COVID and all these excess dollars, excess dollars. They, they can't do anything wrong. The phone rings off the hook, regardless of how good the pizza is. And so,

but sooner or later, you know, you know, you know, our luck's going to run out and we're going to have to get back to serving good pizza with good service. So I'm pushing pretty hard, but I'm sorry to hear that. And,

um, it was, was it her dad that got fired? His boss, her boss. Yeah. P a C a foe says PJ employee here. Nice to see the Papa on your show,

Tim. I can confirm the recipes have been changed since he left to cut some costs. No, again, you can't make a silk purse out of a Sal's ear. I mean, if you want, you know,

it's garbage in garbage out. I mean, I've not figured out how to get quality or authenticity or superiority without paying for it. I just haven't figured out, you know, how you get something really good at the end. If you don't start off with really something good in the beginning so i'm sorry to hear that that was my

as you can imagine being a founder and having your name on the door um on every box um when i hear those kind of stories i get it's it's upsetting it's like you're in the quality control that you were talking about earlier you know the saying garbage in garbage out you always got to make sure you got better ingredients if you want to make a better pizza. Better ingredients, better pizza. You got it, Tim. So I just want to say before I read this next one, welcome to the Internet. MK90 says, the banished one returns once again in an attempt to out-pizza the hut.

All hail the father lord, Jonathan. He shall sit upon the sun throne. Praise the sun. A lot of people are, I think, you know, a lot of people probably became fans when they realized that they were steamrolling you and they were coming after you and it was unjust. So a lot of people were probably just, you know, they looked into your story. They learned about how you treat your employees. They learned about your story with your car. And they're like, here's a guy who works hard, was successful. And boy, did they screw you over.

I'd say boycott these no goodgood you-know-whats. But the problem is I love the franchisees. I mean, if it was just these corporate bank robbers, these folks that are just out for the money, I'd say let's boycott Papa John's until they get back to taking care of their employees and taking care of the product. But I can't do that because I love the franchisees, and they're the small business owners at their interface.

So if I could say boycott all the corporate markets, you know, then that may be a go. But right now we can't say boycott Papa John's even though the product's slipped and the concern and the love for the employees has slipped because it will hurt the franchisees and I would never do anything to hurt the franchisees. Is there a situation where if the corporate wanted to change the ingredients to something terrible that the franchisees could override that and say, we're going to use this at this restaurant? No, they could be pretty verbose about it and boisterous. But you got to understand the franchisees are probably going to want to go along with the cheaper ingredients because they'll make more money short term so franchisees are probably a

little bit more looking at the the finances and the economics whereas the founder looks at it from the spirit and the soul the brand from the authenticity and the quality and the passion for doing it first class so that's why i why I like a business like Papa John's. We were public. We were big. We had scale. You know, that's a good thing. But we ran it like a family-owned business with regard to people and product.

And I think I like the balance of those two. You have to have professional management. You want to run things tight, but you also want to have that human touch in there. This is interesting manifest manifested destiny says i will always believe john got railroaded because he outed the criminal mob running the university of louisville he messed with the corrupt louisville establishment that still hasn't faced any charges is that true what happened with that amen sister she gets she nailed that yeah we we got rid of uh we cleaned there was there was a three-legged stool which is really a four but three the three-legged stool on the university of louisville

and it was corrupt uh was the board of trustees uh we had to get rid of that was the athletic department we had to get rid of all those folks they were paying athletes big money to come to louisville and then the foundation which they embezzled money out of so we finished finished all three of those then what she's referring to is the next was the faculty the faculty has tenure and you can't fire them and no matter what they do you can't fire them and we were going to put a stop to that and make sure that we're here for the kids and we're here to better their education. We're not here so that you can make $200,000 a year and go to Italy every other year. So we ruffled a lot of feathers trying to clean that university up.

Myself, David Grissom, and we had a great board of trustees. We worked hard on that for about two and a half years. But remember, we're hitting them from the top with a three-legged stool, getting ready to be the fourth, and then we had this entrepreneur classes inside that university. So we're stepping on a lot of toes with free markets, entrepreneurship, voluntary exchange, and at the same time, cleaning the house over here from an administrative level. Wow. Jonathan Warner says, sir, when I was in training nearly a decade ago, you presented me and my brothers with pizza and a hell of a drag race with your beautiful Camaro. You honored my brothers that day, and from the bottom of my heart, I thank you.

Appreciate you being out at the races. The one thing I did love is running that Z28 with Don Schumacher, Ler Pritchard, and that whole team. And one of the things they did when i when they asked me is they took my car away from me wouldn't let me race anymore so i miss those days at the race track with with nhra that was fun to be with the fans they're the greatest fans in the world and i got to race that car and then uh to your point we got to give money away um just about every other weekend for the um for some kind of charity sometimes sometimes military yeah all right this one is fantastic matter Matter B Gaming says,

Sell Ian is a pirate t-shirt for $40, then give us the option to download a copy for free so we can see how much money is lost to piracy. Love it. That's actually a good idea. We've been arguing about whether downloading content that's being sold is...

I mentioned to you guys beforehand that if someone... Idea for a future currency with our new crypto thing would be if someone took my digital art and sold it, the crypto would pay them and me. It would go to the creator's wallet. And then the creator, I could say, like, they get 1% of the sale for selling my stuff. This is kind of off topic. I'd rather talk about pizza.

All right. Penny for your podcast says, Papa John, I got to know, what's Peyton Manning like in real life?yton's funny he's cool what you see is what you get um great he um we did a lot of commercials in a short period of time but uh got very close to he and his wife ashley um had two uh two child children twins um marshall mosley um was friends with archie and olivia so i got pretty close to the family uh eli he just a class act uh another brother cooper so just a neat family good values and uh great endorse for endorse of our product when this all went down he and he called me said you know what's up i go I had no idea what's going on here.

And I said, you need to do one thing, Peyton. Until I get to the bottom of what they did, you just need to stay clear of me. And, you know, the phone kind of got quiet. I said, you know, I don't know how they did this. I don't know what they did. There's just no history of this, Peyton. And I said, but I just don't want to tarnish your reputation. And I think he really appreciated that.

And that was the last time we talked. Wow. I love that guy. Yeah. Wow. Wandering Mage guy. Yeah. Wow. Wandering Mage says, My father used to work for Papa John's a long time ago, and he always vouched for how well the pizza was made.

But we've noticed a drop in quality recently. Can't have Papa John's without Papa John, I guess. Stay strong, Papa John. Thank you. God bless. I appreciate that. And one thing, it's kind of like when you get a little bit out of shape, you know, you kind of like it's pain to get back in shape. To make the pizza really well, to run the stores really, really well, it's just hard.

It's every day. And they've gotten a little bit out of shape. And they know if I come back in, first thing we're going to do is have to clean our act up. And I think that's a little bit of a deterrent for the franchisees to want me to come back. Because we are going to, if we do get back, if they crash the thing, which we've crashed it three times before with bad product and bad service and no measurements and no prints. We've done this before. We've seen this movie. I've never seen it with COVID, and it's a whole different environment.

But the first thing you do is you have to go back to the basics. And the basic is food quality and great people. And that's going to take a lot of work. It'll take 5,000 stores in the kind of shape it's in. It'll take a year and a half to get them back in shape. Did you ever experiment with drone delivery service? No, and I like it. I like the drone.

I mean, I hope we can pull that off. They're doing the cars now. I think Domino's announcing that car that drives the pizza to your house. I like that concept because you can put a central kitchen in the middle of the city and not have to build all these restaurants. You just build one giant kitchen and just deliver the pizza with drones. Automatic kitchens, too. The pizza is all automated.

The drone comes in through the ceiling, gets the pizza, and then takes off. I got a question. Like an Amazon warehouse. There's a certain amount of stores that are corporate and a certain amount of stores that are franchised. Is that how it works? Yeah. When I left, approximately 5,000 stores, 600 U.S. corporate, about 2,000 international franchise,

and then about 2,400 North America franchisees. So, yeah, 600 corporate stores is what we had when I left in 2017. So are you allowed to open your own franchise? Have your own? Me now? Yeah. I don't think they would go for that. They're not very happy with me own franchise? Have your own? Me now? Yeah. I don't think they would go for that. They're not very happy with me right now, and I'm not very happy with them.

I'd imagine if you did, people would be like, I'm going there. They would want to drive in and have the real Papa John's. That's a distinct possibility. I don't have a non-compete, so I can do whatever I want to do. That would be amazing. Do they have patents, the recipes? How does that work? I mean, I know the recipe because they're my recipes.

I mean, I don't know if I have to patent it. It's in my brain. The intellectual property rights are in my brain. I don't know if you can trademark that. You can just use a little bit extra sugar, and then it, like, throws the entire recipe off, right? It changes everything. Yeah, but it's a little bit more complicated than that in a good way you can know the recipe but you still don't walk the talk because to do the recipe right costs more money so the reason that they don't do the original recipe to your

call before last is that they're trying to say you know you got bean counters running your business see they think they think the consumer's stupid they think well we'll cut this cut that change that not measure it you know make a less quality pizza. But you just heard it now. We've had four calls where people said the pizza is slipping. That's right. I remember in 95, the pizza just was better. I didn't know anything about the ingredients.

I didn't even care about health when I was 14 or 16 or whatever. But it was just better. It was like $4 more but better. It would be like $12 instead of $10 or something. But it was just so good that my entire family, that was the one. When I saw sucralose, sucralose it's called, in Pizza Hut's dough, I said I will never buy that again. No joke. We're driving.

We're going to the skate park. I go to a gas station. I see this drink in the thing, and I'm like, oh, that looks good. And it says like antioxidant fruit with seltzer. And I grab it, and then I buy it, and then I crack it open, take a sip, and I'm like, whoa, that's really sweet. And there it is, boom, sucralose. And I'm like, garbage. Well, here's the deal.

The FDA comes in from one of these food processors that we talked about and says, hey, that product is inadequate, and it's not up to standard, and we're not going to pass it. That processor goes to their lobbyist, which are probably paying a half million bucks a year that lobbyist goes to that senator that congressman says hey you know the fda agency's jamming me up here i need to get this product through the center whatever calls the agency says hey if you don't pass the product we're gonna we're gonna terminate you or get rid of your agency so the agency is at the beck and call of the lobbyist i.e you get all these chemicals and food our food supply is poisonous yeah potassium bromate particularly is scandal that's terrible d3 fec wants me to inform and remind you john that the phrase anti-racist means you support racial discrimination against people so uh anti-racism has become a specific ideology.

That phrase is a proper noun, not just a general statement now. So I guess you'd say you oppose racism. Your statement was meant to be in opposition to racism. The author, Ibram Kendi, what's his real name? Henry Rogers, I guess. He's a prominent critical race theorist, or at least a derivative of. He writes, he has the book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. And he specifically tells people, you must discriminate on the basis of race. That's his ideology. And I think it's abhorrent.

But he's taken that phrase anti-racism so that in these circumstances, when a regular person says, oh, I oppose racism, I'm anti-racist, when people say, what's anti-racist, they then show his book, which tells people to be racist. It's very confusing, I know. But I guess the issue is if you say you're anti-racist, someone will take that clip and then try and spin it. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you've got to look at what's the intent. I always look at where somebody's heart's at. If somebody comes in and says, you know, by the way, Tim, you look sharp today. Or, hey, man, I like you.

You're looking, you know. I mean, one's a compliment. One is, you know, put down. But you said the same thing. Right, exactly. So it's always, I just look at the intent. I look at the heart. You know, that's right.

But the media and the board of directors and the university, they certainly didn't. You give them the opportunity, you know. But you know that's right but the media and the board of directors and the university they certainly didn't you give them the opportunity you know but you know what to be honest i don't think it mattered um necessarily they would have found something to twist if they were coming after you they were coming after you they were gonna they were coming after me and it's it's quite flattering they couldn't find enough other stuff you know to get rid of me. So they had to fabricate something. There wasn't enough meat on the bone to say we had a violation of Sorbanes-Oxley or we have a bad culture or sales are bad or we're not making enough money. So what do they do? They go out and fabricate a false narrative with racism.

There's a less common saying, if somebody wants to steal your bike, no amount of bike locks will stop them. Yeah. You know, so, you know, this something you that hacker friends of mine have pointed out and i think that's the comment among many of my friends if somebody if you want to get a security system it will stop the people who are passing by who look in your window and your door is locked and they'll keep walking but if you are the target they're out to get you they'll find a way so it sounds like in your case they were just like we'll take whatever we can get and we'll make it the thing.

Yeah, I think I was a marked man. Crandall Logan says, John, you need a restaurant in, please write this down, Smithfield, Utah. Domino's just doesn't do it at all. Someone's got to open a franchise. Smithfield, Utah. Papa John's, I'm sure you're listening to this. Get on the horn. Get off your corporate high and end and sell this franchise in Smithfield, Utah. Papa John's, I'm sure you're listening to this. Get on the horn.

Get off your corporate high and in and sell this franchise in Smithfield. How much you want to – I think it's a very safe bet that some PR firm working with Papa John's corporate is watching this show. Oh, they've got more shirts watching this than Quaker's got on. Are you kidding me? We have like a ton of viewers. I'm like, whoa, a lot of viewers tonight. I wonder if it's all PR company.

When they actually have these board meetings down in Atlanta, because everybody talks, they'll spend 20%, 30% of the board meeting talking about my issues with me. It's kind of funny. Did you own a huge percentage of the company before they fired you off the board? I owned 30% of the company.

31 to be exact. Coop is saying that I'm incorrect. It was 1 million illegal crossings for the month of June alone. Please stop saying year. I thought it was the first six months. Yeah, I thought it was 188K in June alone. You want to Google that just to be sure? I'm pretty sure it was 188,000 in just this past month,

and it was a million for the first, yeah, six months. We will get that fact check. We will see. Let's see. All right, let's see. Holly Salcido says, Papa John's was my first job when I was a teen. Best restaurant I've ever worked for back in 2013. Bless the Papa.

Rip Joey Jordison. Well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. That touches my heart. I have heard a lot of people. Well, I shouldn't say a lot of people. A couple people say that they worked for Papa John's and now we have this. And they said it was great.

The employees were treated really well. We had scholarships from the employees. Like I say, we were the best place to work in Kentucky. It was magical. It was really a blessing from God to watch that thing operate. And to give all these raises and all these promotions, I mean, just, you know, just to watch the smile. You know, when people go home, parents say, you know, I got a raise, and they tell their kids. I mean, they get new cars.

They get new homes. I mean, that's probably the most gratifying thing of the whole gig is when you watch people get promotions and get raises. Oh, did your brother stick? What was the last thing you said? My brother got out in 2002. He clocked out with like $40 million. Oh, awesome. Yeah.

He's the smart one in the family. He gets no publicity no attention he's got homes in aspen homes you know and he's enjoying his life i'm up here on a tuesday night doing a podcast with you guys yeah so we know he's got the brains of the family you guys uh the papa john stores they teach the employees how to make their pizza right right like that 10 point system you were telling me about like the the people who make the pizza know this? Yes. So we got the super chat from Randomonious.

He says, I haven't worked at PJP for seven years now, and even I can tell you what is wrong with the pizza I order. That's amazing. Yeah, that's – to really do a good job, you have to be proud of what you're doing. And when you're making good pizza and you know it's good, you have an emotional attachment to your job. So now all of a sudden we're, and I've heard this from franchisees, the corporate really doesn't care what we're serving, just get it out the door. That lack of pride, then that seeps down to the place is not clean, the service is not as good, and you don't take your job with the the kind of fondness or

affection that you would if you really made a good pizza so yeah once you know how to make a good papa john pizza it's with you for the rest of your life would they use bread machines to get the dough ready or do they do it by hand we never use machines they they're putting dough machines in um they it does save labor um it does make that that uh position a lot easier i don't know enough about dough machines to say it's a lot better a lot worse i know it's not better um but i can't really slam on dough machines because i don't have a lot of experience but i can tell you that it's put in there for cost savings and usually when you save cost and it's not 100 hand toss then youossed, then you're probably sacrificing

quality. The human heat seems like you want to put your love and your spirit into it. I mean, it's the heat. Your body heat is like, it seems like. I mean, I'm into Reiki even. Have you seen the movie The Founder? Yes. They should make The Founder 2, Papa John.

Yeah. I'll let you produce it. We'll do it right here in your studio. But I agree with Ian. We just need more love. More love. It's a living organism. The interesting thing about the movie The Founder, the reason I bring it up somewhat jokingly,

is that you had these two brothers who were very serious about the quality of their food. And this guy comes in. He's like, nah, fast, out the door, powdered milkshakes, whatever, by the land. And it was very corporate, not quality. And so it's not the same story, but it's similar story yeah so we hear a lot you're talking about pasadena um san bernardo the mcdonald brothers yeah mackinville what was it but anyway anyway um and uh crock came in from illinois and he was selling those multi-mixers. And they wanted 26 of them, and they bought 26. And he couldn't figure out why they needed 26 mixers until he went and visited.

And he fell in love with McDonald's. And Kroc was fanatical about what he called QSC&V, quality, service, cleanliness, and value. And at 500 stores, McDonald's actually lost money. And they had a financial guy, Harry Steuborn. They came up with a concept, let's buy the land and rent it to them at 10% of sales. Wow. So Harry Steuborn in the, I think, late 60s, early 70s actually came up with a real estate play for McDonald's. McDonald's wasn't built until like 1961, 63.

Remember, White Castle was 1921. Wow. Crystal was way back there. Burger Chef was way, I mean, a lot of these concepts were 1940 1950 McDonald's was late to the party I even think behind Burger Chef and Burger King and yet Kroc pulled it off with a real estate play that's how that worked yeah

Diego Williams says Papa John best of luck taking back what's yours my girl and I love your Philly pizza also shout out for my girls art business and make it a full-time go to gray, graylagart.com. She does things by commission from animals to D&D characters and fursonas. Is that graylagart.com? Perhaps I pronounced it wrong.

That's what it looks like. All right. Let's see. ZipTie says, the beauty of being self-employed is that you only work half days and you get to choose which 12 hours. Howard Taylor, that's a good one. Yeah, one problem I had when I was at Papa John's, it seemed like every time I stepped away, the thing kind of crashed and burned. So I was basically a prisoner of my own creation.

Today, Rob Lentz, the CEO of Papa John's and the board of directors, they're basically prisoners of my creation. They're the ones that, you know, I mean, I get dividends, you know, stocks at an all time high and I don't have to do anything. So I like the fact that Shaquille O'Neal's an employee. You know, we pay him to do the ads and we pay Rob Lynch as an employee and he basically works for the shareholders. And I like being an owner and letting them be the employees and letting them be in a prisoner of my creation. So I don't have to worry about it. i do like the the half 12-hour days i like that concept yeah that's a good one all right belit says just became a member at timcast and bought 16 acres to homestead and youtube channel called little tails farm thanks for encouraging us to live off grid

absolutely man i i've you know i lived in cities for my whole life. We, I lived briefly in outside of Miami where I had some chickens and we had a little bit of land, but we didn't really do much other than having some chickens. And then now we moved out here from, I was in New York five years ago for a little while. And then we were in Philly for a little bit. Now we're out here. Now we got our own chickens. We got our own garden. We're growing our own vegetables. We got six, six hens and a rooster. The rooster was an accident. We didn't realize we got a own chickens. We got our own garden. We're growing our own vegetables. We got six hens and a rooster. The rooster was an accident. We didn't realize we got a rooster.

Now they're up to laying four eggs per day. We got an incubator, and this is going to be real tough, but we got a bunch of the eggs in the incubator, and it looks like there may be like four or five that are growing, and then we're going to have a bunch of baby chicks, and then we're going to open up Chicken City, and there's going to be families. It's going to be fantastic, man. So shout out be lit good good good job clef the

misfit says i swear to god if you don't make a vlog episode of papa john's house making pizzas and riding in the camaro then the whole channel is pointless yes oh yes requires travel but uh that's what we that's why we have an airplane yeah i i gotta say i have have to imagine if you personally made the pizza, it would be like the best pizza ever. We're going to – the plane holds 11. You get seven seats. We'll send our PR folks up here with you. And you can come up to – bring a couple cameras, bring a little audio, and come up to Louisville. We'll make pizzas in the backyard and drive a Camaro.

Wow. I'll show you Derby City on Papa's style. How long does it take to fly from there to here? 50 minutes. 50 minutes? 50. 50. 50?

50. So not even an hour? No. Wow. How's the weekend after next? For real? I'm serious. Let me know.

I mean, what do you think about making sauces too complex? Simplicity of ingredients. If you go back to Pluto, I think, you know, B.C., he has a saying, what was great architecture, what was great engineering, what was great poetry, simplicity. And if you really watch somebody that's really gifted, take Tim and watch what he does, he makes it look, you know, or you take a sculpture or you watch Tiger Woods hit a golf ball,

they make it look so easy and common. And what we have found that the key to complexity, you know, universal complexities actually are achieved through the porthole of simplicity. So I like anything that's simple. Simple works real good and the ultimate sophistication for anybody is to be able to take something really really complex and make it simple people the corporate folks especially if you get technology people they take things that are real simple and then they get complicated okay and then you're lost you're confused so that's

that that's the opposite of what pluto would do what i would recommend so uh sauce less is better less yeah yeah all right so we're going to do a couple more a couple more super chats uh and then we're the last question we have for you is one of the most important questions that that you could ever possibly answer but first alex magior says quality has gone down the toilet in the last two years it was my family's favorite and now we don't go there anymore i hope you can save the name from Columbus, Ohio. I'm sure it kind of sucks to hear a lot of people saying things like this, but a lot of people have those comments. But now for the most important super chat, the most important question,

so that you can settle the age-old debate. Vantasy says, Tim, can you please ask the papa if pineapple belongs on pizza hawaiian pizzas ham and pineapple i've never been a fan you know it's not one of our big sellers but people do eat pineapple on pizza i i whether you agree or disagree now hawaii they love pineapple ham pizzas that's why they call we i I think we call it the Hawaiian. But no, it's – pineapples, it's more than anchovies. I like anchovies. You like anchovies? Yeah.

What do you think about anchovies? Oh, I love anchovies. No. You don't like them or you do like them? I don't even like putting them on the pizza. Oh, wow. I like anchovies. It saltifies the cheese.

Yeah, it's very salty. But the pineapple thing has always been weird to me because it's like, why not kiwi? It's like, why not cherries? Why not? Let's go. Let's make it happen. You've got to treat it right because if it's too tart, it's going to impact the acidity of the cheese. So you want to mute the tartness of the fruit.

That's why pineapples bake pretty well. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a blast. So thank you all so much for hanging out watching. Smash that like button. Go to TimCast.com. Become a member. We'll have a bonus segment coming up.

It usually goes up around 11 or so p.m. You can follow the show at TimCastIRL. You can follow me personally at TimCast. Is there anything you want to mention before we go? Well, just thank you for having me in, Tim. That was delightful. Thanks for coming. Pleasure to be here.

I appreciate you. And I just have one request. When I i die just make sure i don't vote democrat oh geez fall median crossing is fantastic thanks man this is great love it yeah i really enjoyed this conversation tonight i was just enjoying listening and i didn't want to say i did get that fact check for that person who was saying that a million people came in in June. This is not correct. According to the Texas Tribune, up to June, it has been one million people, 180,000 people in the month of June. You guys are more than welcome to follow me at Sour Patch Lids on Twitter as I attempt to gain more followers than Sour Patch Kids. Thank you all so much for hanging out.

We'll see you over at TimCast.com. Bye, guys.