Happy Birthday to my little sister! We talk about birthdays, twins, and birthdays in general. Happy Birthday to both of us. Happy Birthday, my sister and I! xoxo, Sarah & Matt (Music by Zapsplat and tyops) Music by Jeff Kaale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, and finally, finally, 61, which is the day before my birthday. Happy birthday to my sister! Happy birthday, my little girl! xo Sarah and Matt ( ) ( ) ( ) Sarah & Matt ( ) ( :30) ( :40) :45) :40 :50) :50 :55 Thanks for listening to this episode Sarah and :56 :57 :58 :59 :1 Thank you so much for listening and supporting this podcast! We really appreciate it! XOXO, Sarah, Matt, xo xo XO . XO xo ( ) XO ( ) xo( ) xOoo( ) Xo ( ( xo) Xo (xo) Xo( ) Do you have a birthday story to tell us what you think of this episode? Can't wait to do another one in the next episode with a guest? (Xo) xoXo (xxo) (XOXO) Thanks so much! (Thank you for listening, my friend, Sarah) , <3 (XO) XO( xo, Xo, ) XOXOXO ( , Xo) <3, XO, (YO, xo , ) xxo, xoo, Xoa, xoa (Xoa, Xoa , xoA, , etc)
00:03:54.000But what do you have to do in those situations?
00:03:56.000Do you have to go, do you have to, like, kind of accommodate them?
00:04:00.000I mean, at the end of the day, for me, it's like, it's opportunity cost.
00:04:05.000The amount of time that it would, like, why ruin this person's experience?
00:04:08.000This person, you know, it's, we are, if you're truly in this, like, I'm in the hospitality industry for the purest reasons which I really enjoy taking care of people.
00:04:18.000So if somebody hands you a roadmap on how to make them happy, Use it.
00:04:39.000You gave me that opportunity to make you happy by giving you a drink and you get to tell your friends that I got a free drink and go for it.
00:04:53.000It's hard insofar as it depends on the reasoning.
00:04:59.000I think that if there's some people out there that's maybe just trying to get one up on somebody and trying to get some free stuff and whatever like that, you know they're just taking advantage of you.
00:05:07.000How long have you been in the restaurant business?
00:05:10.000I mean, I started bartending, you know, early 18, 19, so for 24 years.
00:05:16.000So it was one of your first jobs ever?
00:05:54.000And so I was able to take some college classes and then I got accepted into college and went that summer before I turned 17. What was that like being around a bunch of fucking grown-ass kids when you're basically 16?
00:06:42.000So I still enjoy cartoons and Marvel movies or whatever it is and these type of things, this escapism stuff that I feel like I just never really kind of fully got out of the way.
00:06:51.000And so it's like you grew up fast and now it's like you're making up for lost time and doing that kind of stuff.
00:07:06.000And then I started embracing them as I got, I guess, into my 30s.
00:07:11.000Yeah, I think you have a better understanding, and again, not to get so super deep on superhero movies, but I think there is something that really kind of shines a mirror on people.
00:07:23.000If you have this blank canvas and be able to create something as to whatever you wanted, and then you can create this person.
00:07:33.000I remember, I forgot, there's an essay going around or something that's talking about Superman, for instance, and how...
00:07:40.000There is some interesting psychology behind it, the idea that everyone on Krypton is Superman and his alter ego is actually a human as opposed to every other Superhero's alter ego is their superhero, but he actually has to pretend to be normal because he just himself is,
00:07:58.000It's like this weird kind of thing, and I remember reading that kind of stuff and thinking about that and thinking about how, like, most recently, I think, Spider-Man, they finally cast a young guy as opposed to, like, a grown man, and there was, like, what kind of stuff would you go through as a teenager that all of a sudden...
00:08:23.000I think I really enjoy it on a different level.
00:08:43.000Yeah, I think that there's a time, like, when people would come by and say, this didn't have any, it's like, are you arguing the realism, like, the people who pick it apart like that?
00:11:09.000I think that when you're talking about a show or that kind of stuff, when you start to kind of blend the superhero...
00:11:17.000Situations into real life like people aren't gonna be cool with everything and they're not all gonna be cool You know like that's the thing.
00:11:23.000I think there's been a couple you dystopian type of things where What if Superman was bad?
00:11:57.000A similar situation where it's a superhero story and it's about the same thing about these superheroes like Dr. – no, sorry, Mr. something.
00:12:35.000If you gave somebody a ridiculous amount of power or whatever it is, how could you possibly expect that person to just decide to choose pure...
00:13:41.000It's a small upstairs spot that was very kind of...
00:13:46.000Aiming towards crowded, high-energy sharing food, which is probably the least type of place that you want to open up in the last two years.
00:13:55.000That dynamic really exposed like, yeah, this is not what I think a lot of people want.
00:14:01.000But as we've kind of gauged into it, calmed down a little bit and spread some people out a little bit, I think people are obviously more okay with it now.
00:14:09.000But early on, it was like, man, how in the world are we going to pivot from this?
00:14:13.000Well, why the idea of, like, sharing food?
00:14:16.000Like, the idea of, like, doing things family style?
00:14:32.000One of the other groups I'm a partner with at Native, right over here on the east side, It was a hostel.
00:14:38.000And the entire vibe was to go and stay in a room with a bunch of strangers and meet people.
00:14:45.000But when we tried to pivot – sorry, when we tried to reopen and it was like, all right, well, let's keep people safe and spread out the beds and make sure the beds are socially distant and all this other stuff.
00:14:54.000I mean the first night that we opened, the first person that sneezed in the middle of their night, we got a call that was like, I need to move rooms.
00:15:00.000We're just like, yo, this is not going to work.
00:15:03.000This dynamic isn't what we're trying to do.
00:15:06.000The whole hostile thing, you just think immediately about foreign countries.
00:15:09.000You don't think about America when you think of hostiles.
00:15:27.000It was really for the social purposes.
00:15:30.000The idea that you're traveling by yourself in the city you don't know in and it's possible that you'll end up staying in a room with some really interesting people or some people who are also traveling by themselves and have nothing to do.
00:15:52.000I think if you're traveling, especially if you're traveling, it helps kind of lubricate that trip rather than forcing you to go out to a bar and then walk into it and that kind of stuff.
00:16:03.000So when you come up with an idea like that, how does that ever go from the meeting to fruition?
00:16:09.000Just to get other people on board with that.
00:16:41.000If you have that mentality to be able to say that the odds are that somebody else in this room has this exact same mentality, you're kind of ahead of the game.
00:16:51.000These are six people that probably have similar situations than you as opposed to at a hotel where...
00:17:00.000But here, the odds are you're saying, look, I'm not super concerned about my privacy.
00:17:06.000I'm staying in my own little private room.
00:17:08.000I'm a social kind of cat because I picked this one place that has a bar in it and doing concerts, DJs, whatever, that kind of energy.
00:17:18.000I'm also looking to, you know, experience Austin in this kind of way, which they on the east side, like a lot of the little checkboxes that check off to say that this is a kind of person that I am.
00:17:27.000So, you know, especially the east side, right?
00:17:46.000But that was the kind of concept was saying that, all right, we like that aspect of the culture, but we also don't like the idea that this is a place where you're trying to – somebody save money.
00:17:56.000So it's like you're going for a $19 bed.
00:17:58.000So you're trying to save money while you're backpacking through Europe.
00:18:01.000That kind of experience is a totally different – Yeah.
00:18:27.000Well, if you have a group of people and you travel together and you can all rent the room together, that's a great deal.
00:18:39.000One of the things I liked about doing Stubbs when we were doing shows there was you would always come by with all kinds of different food from different restaurants.
00:18:52.000You really celebrate all the local places and establishments and it seemed like you would really take pride in bringing us like these burgers from this one local spot or pizza from another local spot or that kind of stuff.
00:19:10.000I mean, I met Dave years ago, got introduced to him through Questlove, Amir, who's a friend of mine, who's also a foodie, and we met through food as well.
00:19:19.000And I just remember he was coming here, and, you know, no...
00:19:26.000Shade on corporate type restaurants, but it was like one of the conversations we have, especially per people who are on tour, it's like you can a lot of times that kind of experience is comforting.
00:19:37.000Like it's like but people eat McDonald's on the road because it always tastes exactly the same or whatever it is.
00:19:41.000But at the same time, I'm like, if you had somebody to just guide you through whatever city you're in, like, why wouldn't you like why?
00:19:55.000Any of the local cheesesteak spots that are dope.
00:19:57.000Like when I go there and I ask somebody who lives in Philly, they'll definitely say don't go to Pat's and Geno's or whatever it is because that's a tourist trap.
00:20:07.000They would sit there and say where should we go eat and then find out that they ended up going to You know, like one of the nights was Shake Shack.
00:20:17.000But it's like we have local burger spots that are dope that would love to have a chance to serve and expand their audience of people who had to experience their food.
00:21:33.000I think that there's a textural, caramelizational type thing that happens when that happens.
00:21:39.000And I think it's the combo, that squishy bun, that cheese, American cheese.
00:21:44.000There's something nostalgic about that, I think, for me, as opposed to the steakhouse burger, which I'm like, if I'm at a steakhouse, I'm going to eat a steak.
00:21:52.000Yeah, I'm not eating a steakhouse burger at a steakhouse, but I do like a fat burger, a fat, juicy one.
00:24:23.000You know, I'll do the whole backyard barbecue style with the bread, some potato salad, some slaw, some cream corn, some briskets, mac and cheese, whatever, and make it into this amalgam weird white bread burrito type thing and take at least a bite of that.
00:24:36.000I guess you could do that, but for me, the tastes are so good.
00:24:41.000Like a real good brisket, I don't want to fuck that up with white bread.
00:26:55.000He has a legal pad like this written down with all the briskets and the time when they're wrapping them and they're spraying them with apple cider vinegar.
00:27:08.000And that science to that is fundamentally mind-blowing because It's like during the pandemic when everybody was fucking with sourdough bread and I was just experimenting.
00:27:26.000Everyone was doing sourdough because we couldn't find yeast anywhere.
00:27:28.000So people were starting to fuck around sourdough.
00:27:31.000And then for me at least, especially anybody who has any sort of desire, culinary type stuff, I was trying to do stuff that took, if it took normally 30 minutes, I tried to make it take 8 hours.
00:27:42.000Like, for instance, I made a BLT sandwich where I cured my own bacon.
00:27:51.000Take pork belly, mix of salt, sugar, spices, and then let that cure.
00:27:56.000But when you say cure, what does it entail?
00:27:58.000So curing is kind of the chemical process of basically using salt or some sort of other, you know, salt and a mix of other things to draw out moisture to kind of preserve it.
00:28:09.000So are you refrigerating it while you're doing this?
00:30:32.000Because I remember I opened up a sushi bar...
00:30:37.000Years ago and when we were doing taste testing for the rice and the chef was, you know, cook a batch of rice with some kombu and a little this and a little that and that.
00:32:20.000I don't know if the AC was turned on too high, if I was too aggressive with it, if I needed it too much, needed it not enough.
00:32:27.000And so that takes some mentorship there for someone like an Aaron or someone like, you know, somebody from, you know, La Barbecue, like Allie, to come back and sit there and tell me, hey...
00:32:38.000You see right there, you see that jiggle, you need to turn the fire up, or you need to spritz it a little bit less, or this little thing, or put this one in the back where it's hotter, and put this one in the forward, and you gotta do this or whatever.
00:32:48.000And that comes from experience too, but at the end of the day, they don't teach that aspect until you have to be standing right next to you.
00:32:55.000Yeah, the massive amount of time spent barbecuing.
00:33:00.000Those folks that you talked about, like La Barbecue or Franklin's or Terry Black's, just the sheer volume of knowledge that they have in specific dishes.
00:33:10.000I mean, if you look at their menu, they cook like 10 things.
00:33:34.000I don't mean, I was just talking about this, whatever it is.
00:33:36.000But that is the reason why it's here, is German immigrants moved to Texas and then they were smoking meat and then just started changing it and adding.
00:33:45.000Well, it's the difference between like East Coast Italian food versus Italian food from Italy.
00:34:34.000It was brought in by immigrants and it was a cooking thing where they made adjustments to the...
00:34:41.000The demographic they're cooking for, they made it a little bit sweeter, they had access to, you know, a perfect example is American broccoli is typically served with general sauce chicken, but that broccoli doesn't exist.
00:34:50.000The big florets, that broccoli really doesn't exist in China proper.
00:34:55.000You know, we have Gailan, that's why they call it Chinese broccoli, you know, that type of...
00:36:17.000But, yeah, it's like – but that dish, for instance, it's – and so there's no – I mean, fortune cookies or sweet and sour pork.
00:36:24.000It is – I think that the Chinese food had this, you know – Where you get your salinity from soy sauce and you get sweetness from, you know, rock sugar or you add sour from vinegar and this kind of sweet and sour or spicy,
00:36:40.000salty, that kind of this type of blending of foods.
00:36:43.000And it's like I think that when you make that connection and somebody else makes a dish, something like that, then you're like, oh, that has an Asian type flavor because...
00:36:50.000Soy sauce tastes the same when it cooks in a certain way at high heat, that type of stuff.
00:36:55.000So you can invent a complete different dish and call it Asian-ish.
00:36:58.000You can put soy sauce and ginger and sesame seeds on a burger and it's like, well, there's something Asian about this thing.
00:38:04.000I like the idea of thinking if somebody got here, met up, married, was in a community with some Italian folks, and then saw this and decided to use some Chinese flavors and ingredients to do it, but not just this chimera for no reason,
00:39:49.000But then for us, it's like as a business, we're like, well, let's give them something that's a little bit like, you know, we still have a fried rice on our menu.
00:40:33.000We cook rice and then put it back in the fridge for the next day to cook our fried rice.
00:40:39.000Because you want it to dry out so that when you cook it with all this extra moisture and oil and soy sauce and everything like that, it plumps back up to normal, not mushy, the next day.
00:40:52.000So the intention is I've got all these little scraps and bits and leftover little bits of the barbecue that we did or the little chicken dish that we had.
00:40:59.000Add an egg in there and have some old rice that we had from the night before, cook it up again, and then it's like a casserole.
00:41:48.000So when you share all these different dishes, that's the intention.
00:41:53.000You always order six, seven different dishes.
00:41:55.000Like when we eat out as a family, It's like we just order a big table full of food and then we all have our own little rice bowl and then we all just eat a little bit of everything.
00:42:03.000So that was a very pure level of cultural way that we culturally eat.
00:42:09.000It actually makes no sense for you and I to go, you and Jamie, to go eat and say, I'll get the beef with broccoli, whatever it is.
00:42:20.000And then for you to say, oh, that sounds good.
00:43:13.000Yeah, for me, it's just more of like, especially with new restaurants, older restaurants, sure, you'd order what you want, but with new restaurants, I'm like, I want to try seven things on the menu.
00:43:21.000I want to try, I want to get a gamut of how this restaurant really is.
00:43:25.000And I can't obviously eat six different steaks, so if we all each, if the six of us all get a different steak and we all each get a little bit of it, then at least we can all determine which one we really like at the end of the day.
00:43:34.000That might be like the most American style of restaurant is a steakhouse.
00:46:06.000I think that there is a level of respect that comes from that.
00:46:08.000I think there's a lot of people who are kind of in denial of the process of harvesting an animal.
00:46:13.000Yeah, we were talking before the podcast about some folks that get upset at your restaurant if you serve them a fish with the head on it, which is crazy.
00:46:22.000And you just don't want to come to, you don't want to look face to face with, like, the cruelty that is that we are part of this top of the food chain rather than the bottom of it.
00:46:32.000There is nothing more cruel than the fucking ocean.
00:46:35.000The ocean is the cruelest place in the world.
00:47:14.000And we have to be – I think that that's even – again, even in our role as humans and stuff like that, that's – we should come to grips with that.
00:48:12.000Apparently, I don't know the exact reasoning for it, but, like, Wingstop is now called—they have Thighstop because they're doing fried thighs now with— Why are there more thighs than there are wings?
00:48:22.000Well, how many wings do you sit down in a sitting?
00:49:45.000And I think that's one of the things I was talking about.
00:49:48.000I think that there is something to be said about if you're the first person, which is rare to be, I think, in this day and age.
00:49:55.000It's really hard to invent stuff now, I feel like, because we've just invented so much.
00:50:00.000And so the idea, like there's a Japanese dish called sukemen, which is a type of ramen.
00:50:07.000It's like a dipping ramen where you have the sauce, the broth over here, and then you actually dip the noodles separate from the broth and you eat.
00:50:14.000It's almost like a French dip kind of process.
00:50:17.000It's like a mix between soba noodles and ramen.
00:50:20.000So it's like a noodle with no broth at all?
00:50:29.000And so you think about it, when I had it, being ignorant of the invention of it, you'd think that, wow, this was like soba noodles, and people have been doing it for hundreds of years.
00:50:38.000The dude that invented that dish is alive.
00:50:44.000It's just weird that somebody could invent, like if you just walked and met the guy who decided to sell chicken wings from the Anchor Pub, whatever, the Anchor Pub in Buffalo.
00:50:54.000Who is the guy that invented the buffalo wing?
00:54:08.000We yuck each other's yum in a very weird way, in a very consistent and broad way where you can go up to somebody and if somebody's wearing stripes and polka dots and you sit there and go, what are you doing?
00:57:43.000Yeah, and a lot of the cultures, the longer-range cultures.
00:57:46.000And then somehow we harnessed fire and then we started roasting stuff.
00:57:49.000And then boiling had to come after that because you had to have some sort of vessel to boil water, which has got to be fundamentally crazy to think of who could do that.
00:57:58.000Then somebody accidentally tried to boil something in a bunch of rendered beef fat or something.
00:58:46.000I would think so, but I really think that...
00:58:47.000I don't know if potatoes are difficult to...
00:58:50.000Again, if you really look at it, if you talk to somebody who knows the history of this kind of stuff, I don't know the growth, the trajectory of agriculture as to when potatoes were even...
01:00:26.000So you'll take like some water from a puddle like this and you have a UV wand and you just stir the UV light through the water for X amount of minutes and it kills everything.
01:00:38.000The problem is it still tastes like cow piss or whatever the fuck you're actually drinking.
01:00:43.000But you won't die from whatever that is.
01:00:48.000I mean, say what you will, I think that's one thing that this whole last couple years put in perspective is, like, we really, you know, we're living in a pretty magical time.
01:00:58.000Like, it's really still the best it's ever been, you know?
01:01:00.000I mean, even with the pandemic, look, when we think about how many people got really, really sick during this pandemic but survived through the magic of modern medicine, and then...
01:01:13.000Learned at the end of it, like, wow, how valuable is my health?
01:01:21.000A lot of people went right back to eating bullshit.
01:01:24.000A lot of people got real close to death and they were real scared and they went right back to being fucking sloppy.
01:01:30.000And it's sad, but a lot of people didn't.
01:01:33.000A lot of people just started recognizing, you know what?
01:01:36.000I am more robust if I'm thinner, if I'm healthier, if I'm eating good food, I'm taking in nutrients and vitamins, and I'm exercising on a regular basis, the quality of my life improves, I'm more resilient.
01:01:47.000And if something does happen, you bounce back far quicker.
01:01:51.000And if there's anything that we learned from this pandemic, it's that.
01:01:58.000I mean, there's all sorts of disputes about the numbers, but at least at one point in time, it was 78% of the people who were in the ICU with COVID were obese.
01:02:12.000And it's also like, I think that psychologically speaking, I think that also, I mean, it slowed us a lot down.
01:02:18.000I think there's a lot of stuff that takes, you know, having a flat tire to get some of these people pull off to the side of the road for a second.
01:02:32.000And the first couple of days, all I thought about was like, okay, now I get a little break.
01:02:39.000And then while I was having that little break, I was like, why do I live so crazy?
01:02:44.000Why am I jamming so many lives into one life?
01:02:49.000Because that's kind of what I'm doing.
01:02:51.000I'm kind of jamming multiple lives into a single life.
01:02:54.000And it seems like that's the only way I'm legitimately satisfied, which is very odd.
01:02:59.000And I think it's part and parcel with your success, though.
01:03:02.000I think that you talk about the wherewithal to do that is also the wherewithal for you to do what you do.
01:03:08.000I have a lot of friends of mine that have come up to me.
01:03:11.000Over the years, and they've talked to me and wanted advice about opening up their own bar or whatever like that, but these guys also still sleep till 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
01:03:21.000If you don't have that drive, then I don't know how to get that for somebody.
01:03:27.000It's just like the opposite is true for fitness for other people.
01:03:30.000The people that get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, get a workout in, like yourself.
01:03:33.000And I'm just like, I can't complain about not being in this tip-top shape if I don't have the wherewithal for me to kind of do that kind of stuff, to devote to that kind of thing.
01:03:43.000There's a very clear and easy method for developing that, though.
01:04:33.00030 days or whatever, it's a development habit.
01:04:35.000Yeah, because it's a rock-solid habit with me now, but it's helped me in the past tremendously, especially when there's a lot of things on that list.
01:04:42.000And I know I've got to get those things done, but I could just fuck off and watch YouTube for an hour, and then I'll miss two or three of those things that I'm supposed to be doing.
01:04:51.000But I think it's like, again, slowing down, making that a priority in your life.
01:04:57.000That's what actually ultimately, we didn't know each other too much, but I've lost about 60-something pounds over this pandemic.
01:05:03.000And a lot of it started from me realizing that I work too much, I don't have time to work out, was all bullshit.
01:05:10.000Because when I didn't have anything to do, I still wasn't.
01:05:15.000I woke up and I was like, I didn't do anything today.
01:05:38.000A friend of mine texted me yesterday and she said, I need to get a treadmill because I'm gaining all this queso weight since I moved to Texas.
01:05:50.000And I said, well, go around Lady Bird Lake.
01:07:11.000Because a couple things is, number one, I don't know about you, but for me, I eat less when I cook.
01:07:18.000The entire thing myself whether it's the work that it took into it or tasting it or looking at it all like when I go to a restaurant I'll overeat but at home after I cook my entire meal or whatever the tendencies for me to eat less it's just very that's interesting I wonder why yeah I don't know it might be a restaurant thing maybe because I do it for a living it's like don't get high on your own supply type thing I don't know what it is but it's just when I host people when I serve if you ever come to my house and I'll cook for 30 people or whatever it is The tendency is for me,
01:07:47.000I might not even fix myself a plate after cooking for two and a half hours.
01:07:50.000I was like, I don't even want to look at it anymore.
01:07:52.000I'm happy to serve everybody and be done with it.
01:07:54.000One thing I started doing differently over the pandemic is I started cooking over live wood, over hard wood.
01:08:00.000That was a new thing that I started doing.
01:08:03.000Because I just was like, let me try this.
01:12:39.000So to figure out that balance, like a good jerk seasoning or something like that, it's like, man, you want to be able to taste the pimento and taste the smoke and taste the...
01:12:49.000You can't just light people up for no reason.
01:12:51.000It's like there's got to be some depth to it, and I like that layers of that kind of stuff.
01:12:55.000Hot sauce is also, and spice and kick, is also very subjective.
01:14:03.000There's some, like, Mexican comfort food, like tacos and burritos and quesadillas, like, there's something about Mexican with the spices and the use of the cheeses and the...
01:15:30.000It's marination or barbecuing or slow roasting or whatever it is.
01:15:37.000There's the idea of fast food out of convenience, but...
01:15:41.000That's not, it's weirdly, you know, I don't think it's as comforting.
01:15:45.000Now, some people might argue and sit there and say McDonald's is comforting as hell, but I think that's the nostalgic stuff that talks to you about is saying, grow up, and it goes back to somewhere in your brain that brings you up to making you feel like a kid again.
01:15:58.000But at the end of the day, I think that when you have a culture that makes a soup that takes eight hours or spaghetti sauce or some sort of roast that took all day or a pig roasted something that took all day, that translates into a comfort.
01:16:16.000Those flavors really kind of pinpoint something, I think.
01:16:19.000Yeah, there's probably something also where you're aware of the effort that's involved in creating a dish like that.
01:16:54.000That's what is one of the philosophical things that always blows my mind is like the idea of like, I wonder, like, just like you can't, I can't tell what color you're seeing.
01:18:25.000And there's a lot of people who think that happiness is finite.
01:18:29.000That if you get too much, you're taking it from me.
01:18:32.000That you're taking more than your share, almost.
01:18:35.000I feel like when you wake up one day and you see somebody happy, and if you're not happy, you almost feel like this person's hogging all the happy.
01:18:59.000You know, your attitude can dictate a lot.
01:19:01.000It's literally the way you set up your interactions, like the way you think about things.
01:19:07.000And for some people, they're just selfish, and they don't want other people to be happy.
01:19:11.000And I think that we talk about it also, we touched on it offline too, is that Without this interaction in social media, you and I sitting down and having a conversation right now, I can see your reactions.
01:19:24.000And so much of that communication is that way.
01:19:26.000But after this is done, there's going to be a lot of people that just lob comments at us, that we don't look at their face.
01:19:33.000They don't see us reading it or if we read it or not.
01:19:40.000So when I got sick in January with Dave and all them, And the amount of people, the comments that we're getting, I had to turn off my comments just because my phone was draining from battery.
01:19:51.000I don't even know how you live, how people at your level of reach live when you have another 12 million comments or whatever it is.
01:20:00.000But it's just kind of like, these are real humans on Earth.
01:20:04.000Unless you think that they're bots, unless they're really like robots out there just making weird-ass comments.
01:21:08.000Like I've developed a discipline, and that discipline is to treat people as nicely as possible, interact with people in as pleasant a way as possible, as friendly a way as possible, work at it.
01:21:44.000I express myself so often because of the podcast and I'm overwhelmed by the amount of feedback that comes my way.
01:21:55.000So I don't have any desire to express myself in any extra ways.
01:22:00.000But there's a lot of people out there that are just addicted to likes and comments and interacting with people in this weird sort of shallow peripheral way, this surface way.
01:22:12.000It's a very unhealthy way of spending your time interacting with people.
01:22:18.000And occasionally it bleeds off into real life, and you see people treat people and talk to people in real life the way they do online, and it's rude, and it's awful, and you see it, and it's just like, it's jarring.
01:22:32.000Yeah, I was saying, as people went back out into public after being locked down for a little bit, I mean, people have gone feral.
01:22:53.000I mean I'll say 100 percent like even when – and you asked me to come talk and – And it was like, you know, I was like, what are we going to talk about?
01:27:31.000But I'll tell you, the one thing that also, I think, put in perspective a lot of people, as I hope, is I had a couple friends of mine that were panicking about and then would look in their pantry or whatever.
01:29:00.000You know, it's interesting if you stop and think about how many people rely on fast food for a large percentage of their meals, if that was eliminated.
01:29:09.000If you cut out all the Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and Jack in the Box and all that stuff, if, like, that was off the menu.
01:29:17.000I wonder how different people's lives would be and how differently they would think about food.
01:29:23.000Because for so many people, hungry means I'm going to pull into this drive-thru and I'm going to order and then in five minutes I'm going to be eating a sandwich.
01:29:33.000So if that wasn't available and you had to really think about food in terms of nourishment and then preparation and like if there was no fast food, imagine if there's a food supply, it's not a problem, but there's no more restaurants.
01:30:02.000And I think that there's also something to be said about The care of cooking yourself, the sitting around a table, sharing a meal or something.
01:30:41.000I remember one of the crowning moments in my, like, happy moments in my restaurant career was I remember this family brought in their son for freshman orientation.
01:30:52.000And then four years later, brought him in for their graduation dinner.
01:30:54.000I remember watching this kid like, oh my god, has it been four years?
01:31:20.000It's like this person really enjoyed what we're doing.
01:31:24.000It's gotta be cool when you're there on like a busy Saturday night and you're looking out at this restaurant, all these people having a great time, and you are providing them meals.
01:31:35.000I say it's probably the closest and I think that's why I relate to entertainers, musicians.
01:31:42.000Because I think the same thing when everyone's laughing at something that you said or singing along to the music that you wrote.
01:31:51.000And that's one of the things I think I related because I think the creative process to doing all that other stuff is very similar to cooking.
01:32:00.000You know, I think that the reason why I relate to musicians in that way also is the recognition of being able to kind of pull from this database of knowledge of what this is supposed to sound like and that and realizing that these three things sound good together, these three things taste together.
01:32:16.000I had a conversation before where watching, I had a chance to watch one of my friends who's a producer produce a track and he was like, Playing this track and then he all of a sudden was like, oh!
01:32:30.000And he reached in his bag and got a flash drive and put it in and pulled this sound, this little zzzz sound, whatever it is, and put it in there and slowed it down and blah blah blah and threw it in there.
01:32:38.000And then the epiphany moment was when we were doing testing at the menu and then we were cooking something and we were tasting it and then he's like, lemons.
01:32:49.000Not lemon juice, not lemon segments, not lime.
01:32:53.000He's just been able to pull from this pallet out of the ether and said that this dish would be good with some lemon zest in it.
01:33:00.000And the best chefs are able to do that.
01:33:03.000If you watch like Master Chef and these amazing chefs, when they're blind tasting those 60 ingredients, and they can be like hoisin, sesame oil, pepper, white pepper, Szechuan peppercorns, that's a habanero, nope, that's serrano, it's greener.
01:33:15.000Whatever it is, and to be able to have that on demand.
01:33:20.000And again, every entertainer has that palette.
01:34:19.000There's this weird trial and error, and then there's so many different variables that come into play, like your own attitude, whether you approach a subject with bemusement or anger, or you're laughing at it,
01:34:38.000or you're furious at it, and it varies.
01:34:57.000And so when you're pandering, people can tell.
01:35:00.000Bullshit has never been more obvious, but never been more prevalent.
01:35:06.000This is the first time in my life that I can recall a general distrust of the news is the norm.
01:35:14.000It's so funny you say that, because we were talking the other day amongst our friends.
01:35:19.000We're saying a lot of this stems From a general distrust of everything.
01:35:24.000And I think a lot of it, if we really kind of pinpoint, again, I'm simplifying things for sure, but the biggest problem I think we have right now is confirmation bias.
01:35:55.000And then there's people willing to lie to you because they're in the same tribe as you and they want that confirmation bias to be cemented into your mind.
01:36:03.000And it is the hardest thing because it's like they do these psychological studies like go outside and look for red cars and you're going to think that there's nothing but red cars on the street.
01:36:11.000I mean you really you have this opportunity to do that and as technology has this access to it to be able to make something look very official and very real It's very difficult to have that as opposed to – and this is why,
01:36:26.000again, someone like having this type of platform and you able to talk to anybody and everyone, I mean, it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people because – You're just talking to people.
01:36:42.000And then it's like, well, why are you having this conversation with this person that I don't agree with?
01:36:48.000And it's like, well, I had a conversation with a person that you do agree with yesterday, and you didn't say shit about that person.
01:36:53.000Like, why are you not mad that we're spreading that person?
01:36:57.000You know, it's kind of like this interesting thing when you have this platform that allows you to do that, and I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that, whereas something that I think that is very...
01:37:10.000It's very needed and the people that are avoiding it, they're avoiding these uncomfortable moments where they might agree with someone that they have this ideological rift with.
01:37:25.000Whether the person's on the right or the person's on the left, the person is this or that.
01:37:32.000It's a really dumb way to communicate.
01:37:34.000I'm curious as to why people think and believe things and the way they communicate and why they've lived their life a certain way and why they have these very rock solid morals or ethics or why they don't.
01:37:49.000But that's why I did this in the first place.
01:37:53.000I've always been a person who's interested in talking to people because I'm not exactly sure why I think the way I think sometimes.
01:38:00.000I want to hear the way other people think.
01:38:03.000And through that, you learn a lot about yourself.
01:38:06.000And then you also pick up things that you admire about the way other people approach life and you apply those to your life and to the way that you interact with other people and life itself.
01:38:18.000I think anything that you practice, you get good at.
01:38:20.000And I think that we're out of practice from that.
01:38:22.000I think that you get into these echo chambers very easily.
01:38:25.000Well, that's a real problem with social media.
01:38:27.000Yeah, you tend to gravitate towards people that agree with you.
01:38:29.000Of course, it feels good to have a bunch of people in the same room patting you on the back and telling you how smart you are or how much we agree with each other.
01:38:45.000I was the guy that when somebody came and knocked on my door to try to spread whatever gospel there was at that moment, whatever religion or whatever it was, I was, come on in.
01:38:56.000Because I'm like, you say you have the truth.
01:38:59.000I thought I was being told the truth in church every Sunday.
01:39:43.000There's a real strong arrogance because they feel like if I'm talking to someone who believes that the earth is hollow and that aliens live inside of it and they're playing with our minds through fucking radio waves or whatever, The people that think that that's dangerous,
01:39:59.000the reason why they think it's dangerous is not because it's dangerous to them.
01:40:04.000They think it's dangerous because they think some people are gullible and stupid, and those people are going to be easily influenced by that.
01:40:11.000And I find that to be a very strange argument, and it's a very arrogant argument, because they're only looking at it in one way.
01:40:24.000But the problem with even me saying this, though, is that there's real evidence that it is dangerous.
01:40:59.000But that is a good example of a bunch of people that are kind of aimless and lost and fairly gullible and not very sophisticated in their ability to objectively analyze Q. Facts and data and just conversations and try to figure out what's real and what's not.
01:41:20.000And also this real desire to be a part of this inside group of people that have some secret information and that this secret information will eventually change the world.
01:41:33.000And there's a weird desire that people have to be a part of that and they get overwhelmed by it.
01:41:41.000And that's a big part of what that show was about.
01:41:43.000A big part of that docu-series, which I really, really enjoyed, is psychology.
01:41:48.000It's about the psychology of hidden truth, the psychology of people trying to right the wrongs and trying to think that they're a part of something that's bigger than them.
01:41:59.000And most of those people, one of the things you'll notice in that documentary, For lack of a better term, and I'm not trying to be cruel, they're fucking losers.
01:42:10.000Most of the people that got really locked into this shit are losers, meaning they're social outcasts, they're not successful in their chosen field, they're not particularly interesting or disciplined or excellent at anything.
01:42:25.000So being a part of something larger than that makes them feel...
01:43:26.000And this was at a time in my life where I had completely abandoned baseball.
01:43:30.000I wasn't interested in it at all because I had really gotten into martial arts.
01:43:33.000And so I used to be a baseball fan and in fact the way I found the Taekwondo school that I eventually joined was through a baseball game.
01:43:41.000I went to a baseball game at Fenway Park and then waiting for the T, which is the transit system, waiting to get on the T, I wound up walking up the stairs and found this Taekwondo school.
01:44:05.000I think it points to also, again, how good we kind of have it, that these type of, like, we haven't, again, without saying, obviously people are going through some shit, but it's, when something like that can ruin your day,
01:44:31.000Or it might be a little bit of the opposite, meaning that's the only thing good in your life is that you have a team that's doing really well.
01:44:37.000But I remember right in the very beginning of all this, I was talking to my grandmother.
01:46:15.000And so she's like, I should be thankful that you never had to learn it because we knew that word because we had to deal with a lot of shit like this overseas back in the day.
01:46:24.000Well, especially when she was a child.
01:46:26.000It was just a decade after the Spanish flu.
01:46:38.000You know, it would have felt like that, just random, like, without understanding it, you know, even though, obviously, during the Spanish flu, people actually knew about it a little bit more.
01:46:45.000But it's still, it's like perspective-wise, I think when people gravitate these things, like you said, cue and searching for all this stuff, we have a lot of time.
01:47:17.000That you're down with Q and you understand Q and all these t-shirts that say, where we go one, we go all.
01:47:23.000And they get real wacky with it because it becomes everything to them.
01:47:27.000But you see that in so many aspects of our society.
01:47:32.000You see it in people who are vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
01:47:36.000You see it in people that support masks and lockdowns versus support freedom.
01:47:42.000You see it in people that are left-wing versus right-wing, people that care about climate change versus people that think we have other problems that are bigger and we need to...
01:47:54.000That sort of tribalism and also the adopting of ideas instead of thinking them through, this predetermined pattern of behavior and thought that so many people just sort of adopt.
01:48:07.000Instead of thinking through themselves, form their own opinions, decide that these opinions are not you, they're just thoughts and ideas, and don't identify with them.
01:48:21.000There's something I remember reading a study about that was fascinating about talking about the changing of your opinion is akin to actual physical damage.
01:48:30.000There's actual pain associated with it.
01:48:34.000No, for all of us, they're saying that there's, depending on how the trickle-down effect of changing something that you identify with can shatter your entire world.
01:48:46.000Like, if you believed in, you know, like, I have to show it to you.
01:48:54.000I'm butchering the science behind it, but it's along the lines of saying that if you really based off your identity off of a religious thought process, or let's say as a kid, it's like you believed in Santa Claus and then all of a sudden found out they were, you know, whatever.
01:49:06.000I'm about to spoiler alert for the people who might be listening that don't know that yet.
01:49:09.000But that concept is actual if they really kind of do a brainwave study.
01:49:29.000And I think that a lot of people aren't willing to do that.
01:49:31.000It's like, this is why when you associate with this one thing, or this one team, or this one person, or this person, it's like why they say never meet your heroes.
01:49:54.000Well, it's because I'd rather have just lived my entire life thinking this person is amazing instead of finding out that they're just like me in that way.
01:50:03.000And it's an interesting thing I think now with this kind of stuff is like when you join these tribes you join these kind of mentalities like this being a part of this community you know this is stuff it just really helps people who are who are kind of like you said is lost well I saw that a lot with gangs you know what growing up growing up it's like it's not these aren't criminals these people that didn't want to do that is they need family they need family We grew up in a thing.
01:50:27.000It was very logical to me to see, luckily, even though I grew up single parent and everything like that, and my grandmother helped raise me, I didn't go that direction.
01:50:39.000I could see because if I was going through some shit and this person over here said they would help me out and watch my back, that's how it starts.
01:50:51.000And when you think about the erosion of the family and how many people don't have that feeling of someone being completely committed to them or a tribe that they completely belong to, and then something comes along like a gang that not only are they completely committed to you,
01:51:08.000And the people that are different, the people that are opposed, they are the literal enemy, which is something that's hardwired into us.
01:51:19.000From the real tribal days, from the days of, you know, when you were literally a small group of 150 people worried about being invaded by other people.
01:51:29.000And that was the reality of human existence for thousands and thousands of years.
01:51:34.000And I think our brain is very binary in that way, too.
01:51:36.000I think that's what we talk about also in this kind of organization, the stuff that we're doing now, Right.
01:51:59.000I'm neither of neither, depending on the situation.
01:52:03.000It's like you're talking about either you hunt and you're pro-killing every animal on earth or you have to be vegan or something like that.
01:52:14.000It's this weird thing where we kind of polarize and we just naturally...
01:52:21.000You know, galvanized into this kind of thing and put somebody into this little box as opposed to having to sit there and go, all right, where is all the nuance in all of this conversation?
01:52:38.000Well, if you work all day, though, like, say if you have some, like, labor-intensive job or some job that requires a lot of thinking and You know, you got eight hours a day plus commuting.
01:52:48.000The amount of time that you have left to sort through all the ideas that you would need to vet in order to have like a real nuanced perspective on life.
01:53:21.000Like, hey, maybe it's good if we censor these people.
01:53:25.000Like, well, censorship has never been good historically, and here's why.
01:53:28.000And you have these conversations with them, and then you realize they never thought this through at all.
01:53:32.000They never thought through where this all goes.
01:53:35.000They just have decided that if you say a certain thing, a certain group of people that they're friendly with or familiar with, you go, yes, and that's what they want.
01:53:45.000You bring up a good point on that, too, because I think that that's one of usually my big question is I don't necessarily care what you believe in.
01:53:52.000I just want you to know why you believe in it.
01:55:06.000I think ultimately when you have this conversation with somebody and somebody says something, an opinion, and that you have this drive inside you to tell them that they're wrong, to convince them that they're right.
01:55:16.000I mean, I think you and I are alike in that way where I'm curious as to why you believe this.
01:55:23.000Not necessarily because I need you to believe what I believe, but I recognize that you don't believe what I believe.
01:55:28.000So I'm curious as to why do you believe that?
01:55:31.000Man, these people are trying to get you to switch to Android, you know?
01:57:28.000It was like, if you've ever done any recreational drugs, you really have no right to talk about that you're concerned about testing and whether or not something has...
01:57:41.000I'm okay with you not wanting to do that.
01:58:08.000Whether or not I still believe it at the end of the day doesn't mean anything.
01:58:11.000I might still believe it and say that I still want to do that.
01:58:14.000Like I said, inviting this guy in to speak to me about their religion.
01:58:18.000And at the end of the day, I might believe in my religion and still say that, hey, that's fine.
01:58:23.000But at the very least, I let you speak your piece, you know?
01:58:26.000I think at the end of the day, the big problem is people that identify with their ideas.
01:58:32.000And their ideas aren't just something that they're examining.
01:58:36.000There's things that are obviously cleared.
01:58:59.000Like, why do you believe this and why do you think that's wrong?
01:59:03.000And it becomes your identity in a lot of ways.
01:59:06.000And when your identity is wrapped up in ideas, and these aren't, again, not moral or ethical ideas that we could agree are beneficial to communities and beneficial to groups.
01:59:18.000But instead, just ideas that you have decided to adopt and that these now are a thing that you will fight for.
01:59:55.000What I'm saying is it's so difficult because if you associated your entire identity with this idea, when somebody disrupts that idea, your entire identity is disrupted.
02:01:20.000Or what's, you know, what's the real motivation behind this drug being pushed?
02:01:25.000Like, what the fuck is going on with that guy who's...
02:01:29.000And there's so much of that in this world that it's – you could lose yourself.
02:01:34.000Like if you didn't have a job and your entire day was sifting through the news and trying to find truthful narratives versus propaganda, you would lose your fucking mind.
02:01:45.000How much do you think is that because – how much do you think right now the exaggeration of it is because of that?
02:01:51.000Because that people have a chance to now consume – So much of this information.
02:01:57.000I think that, you know, locking people in their house where they just have access to the internet.
02:02:01.000I thought about it this way when I remember we were in the beginnings of our first quarantine kind of lockdown thing.
02:02:09.000And I was like, I still had Netflix, and I still had FaceTime, and I still had...
02:03:36.000So I think that maybe us now with access to all this information and all this content and all this data and all these people, all these voices of somebody that used to do 10 minutes of Twitter now doing four hours of Twitter and just sitting there and getting in these looped rabbit holes, I mean, it's got to be damaging.
02:03:53.000Like we said, a lot of it is junk food.
02:04:36.000And it's like, you know, I think that there's a monetization of...
02:04:40.000Of human suffering, I think, is difficult.
02:04:43.000You know, anytime you have that opportunity to where, because it's more interesting and it's more, you want eyeballs onto your content, so you just, it's a very simple algorithm.
02:04:53.000It's just, we just need eyeballs, so whatever got people to watch it, then let's get more of that instead of stuff that's not interesting, you know, that might be just very boring data, you know, and so I think you just tend to lean towards that kind of stuff a little bit, and I think it's tough.
02:05:21.000They don't take the time, and that's...
02:05:23.000Oddly enough, where podcasts have sort of come in to fill that void because in podcasts you can have two intelligent people just sitting down talking about stuff in a way like, well, maybe that's not true.
02:05:57.000And I think a lot of that was exacerbated during the time that Trump was president.
02:06:02.000The media was so upset that Trump had become the president and so upset that what they thought this con man was now running the entire government, that it's time to fight fire with fire.
02:06:13.000And so they started attacking in the same way that they felt like he was attacking, the way he would call...
02:06:20.000People by a nickname, you know, Lion Ted or, you know, fucking Lion Hillary or Crooked Hillary or, you know, have all these nicknames for people.
02:06:30.000Call the news the fake news and like, God, we have to fight fire with fire.
02:06:35.000We have to attack the same way he's attacking.
02:06:37.000But in doing so, they've undermined their credibility to an almost irreparable way.
02:07:03.000I think that that's the balance of it all, to sit there and say, Again, I'm even victim of what we're talking about right now, which is to say that while I believe that we probably lean this way, we're not to say that it's no such thing, that it's not possible that there's some puppet master out there that's really kind of affecting this this way or that the third.
02:07:23.000But I'm just saying that at the end of the day, not everything has such a mastermindful type of thought process behind it.
02:07:32.000I think some of it is a lot more Simple.
02:07:44.000Narratives that are set up in order to have people extract money from a system.
02:07:48.000And that's what's really scary, is that you follow the money and it's right there.
02:07:53.000And, you know, many people have talked for years about getting money out of politics and getting money out of...
02:07:59.000To make it so that these people that make these huge decisions, That affect policy, affect the way we're allowed to live our lives, that there should be no money being exchanged in these decisions.
02:08:31.000And that is what affects these people and that's what affects the way they behave and the way they communicate and the things they talk about and the things they won't talk about maybe sometimes is as important.
02:08:42.000Yeah, I think that that goes in with the incentivization of certain things.
02:08:46.000And that's what I was talking about earlier about the incentivization of human suffering and stuff like that.
02:10:47.000And so we see it in that kind of situation where we're like, if the product that or whatever you use is human suffering, then the logical said, in order for me to make more profit from it, I need more suffering.
02:11:05.000There's more money in the treatment than it is in the cure.
02:11:34.000These are all – there's some basic business 101. But then you start doing that with other things that are a little bit more needed for society, insurance or healthcare or, you know, prison system, all the stuff.
02:11:49.000When you have money attached to it, the incentivization starts to become human experiences.
02:11:53.000And so then you start with a situation where – Yeah, in order for us to, like we said, like Bo Burnham's bit, it'd be weird to sit, imagine sitting in the boardroom and talk about sales are plummeting, but that would be a good thing.
02:12:06.000In theory, but it's like, no, in this world, you'd have a situation where you're like, no.
02:12:13.000Like if the insurance company sat there and goes, hey, we paid out millions of dollars last month from actual people that needed our service.
02:12:23.000Well, you can't treat certain things the same way we treat businesses, and the problem is they do.
02:12:28.000Like, if business is booming in the burger business, that's great, it means more people want burgers.
02:12:33.000If business is booming in the homeless business, that means you are not doing your job.
02:12:38.000You are allowing the homeless crisis to get worse and worse, and you're getting more and more money, and the budget gets bigger and bigger every year, and no one hits the brakes on it, because it's literally farming.
02:13:18.000Like I said, it really became prevalent to me in these conversations with these charities that I sat down and they're talking about was that we want my last check, we want the last check to bounce.
02:13:28.000We want to be, we want to raise X number of dollars and say, we're good.
02:13:35.000This is enough for us to finish this problem.
02:13:37.000Well, it's spooky when you look at a charity and you find out how much money the actual charity gets, like how much goes to the actual problem and how much goes to administration costs and how much it goes to the salaries of people that are involved in the charity.
02:14:04.000But the point of that, again, we're talking about is that the marketing that's required to do that is the idea of saying how much effort is put into fundraising and how much time it takes also.
02:14:20.000So there's a lot of resources that are attached to that.
02:14:43.000In order for art to be free, art has to beg for money all the time.
02:14:47.000You know, the museums and everything like that is constantly charity-driven.
02:14:50.000And we're like, well, why don't we tie in...
02:14:52.000The reason I'm involved is from the F&B perspective is to say, if we get a whole bunch of people coming here to view art for free and then we sell them all a drink and a hot dog, we could fund that art product.
02:15:01.000And then we could always make art free because people are going to naturally spend money on it anyways.
02:15:05.000It's kind of almost like an amusement park kind of business model.
02:15:09.000It's like, to me, it's a little bit of a disruptor in that way is because to sit there and say that these type of things, the arts, quote unquote, you know, it's like, well, how do we, to make it become a self-sustaining machine as opposed to constantly trying to fundraise?
02:15:25.000Well, you have to throw a gala for 100 grand to raise 150 grand, and then you actually only made 100 grand, only made 50 grand.
02:15:32.000And so it's like a weird thing to where it's like, well, why don't we kind of start this machine and then just be done with it and say, let this kind Also, it's like when someone says art should be free, like, okay, why?
02:15:46.000Well, because I think that allowing art, it's like steel sharpens steel, right?
02:15:50.000I think that there's a thing to say that street art, for instance, the kind of person that goes out there to practice or to learn or to be able to express themselves.
02:15:59.000I think it's important for people to do that.
02:16:01.000I don't think that everyone has their inner vandal to go out and And do that.
02:16:07.000It's like because if you're going to be good at street art, you have to go and paint up some public walls somewhere.
02:16:12.000And it was one of the things that we noticed while we built the big art park, the graffiti park that was happening downtown that was the original place.
02:16:57.000I mean, Banksy did this thing a while back where he...
02:17:00.000Whoever he was or his minion or whatever it was that sold pieces on the street corner for 20 bucks and then did it all on social media or whatever and then showed people that, hey, you just bought an original Banksy for 20 bucks.
02:17:51.000If you're an artist and you want to make a living being an artist, it shouldn't be a risk in that way.
02:17:56.000You might not be good at it, which is fine, but we need to teach somebody how to start a corporation so that they understand how to do their taxes properly.
02:18:03.000We need to tell them how to trademark their stuff or copyright their things so they don't do this kind of stuff, or the education somebody's aware.
02:18:10.000When somebody says they want to become an artist, they don't have to start off.
02:18:14.000How do you have the time to do all this?
02:18:15.000How do you have the time to do all this while you're involved in multiple businesses and restaurants?
02:18:20.000Restaurants luckily at this point is backfilled, meaning I've left a day-to-day operations for restaurants generally.
02:18:26.000We have managers and we have people below.
02:18:41.000One of the reasons why I never became a professional, professional chef in that way was because I don't want to cook the same thing over and over again.
02:18:47.000I was always talking about, I cook like jazz.
02:18:49.000Every meal is different from day to day because whatever I feel like.
02:18:53.000So you just establish the menu, help establish it.
02:19:23.000The love I have was the final product, is this experience that people have.
02:19:29.000Kind of amazing that you've managed to navigate that world, though, and get to the other side while still maintaining your love for the food itself and the way it's cooked.
02:19:43.000I think that me not having to grind, to turn it into that, I think that's what kept me sane.
02:19:53.000I think that if I had to cook the same thing, if I was the guy who invented chicken wings, he probably never wants to see another chicken wings.
02:21:10.000It was actually wonderful to see because I knew his old material.
02:21:13.000And I was like, man, talk about rehearsed.
02:21:16.000I mean, like I said, the Part that I admire about your job is that you're telling a story and it sounds like the first time you ever told it, but you guys have rehearsed the shit out of it.
02:22:08.000That's a part of the problem is one of the things about nightclub performing and performing doing stand-up is you're guaranteed to be in a room full of drunks.
02:24:42.000It became things where people would just tell joke jokes.
02:24:45.000And then along the lines, Lenny Bruce came along, and Lenny Bruce was heavily influenced by drugs.
02:24:53.000And his love of drugs, I think, also led to an erosion of the sensibilities of the common culture.
02:25:03.000Like, he felt like they were foolish, and he would examine them and discuss them, and then talk about All these sort of taboo subjects and talk about all these things that we just took for granted that are really kind of ridiculous.
02:25:37.000Pryor was the first guy to take that sort of brutal honesty and turn it on himself and make it very personal and very relatable and also just masterfully funny.
02:25:51.000He was so much funnier than anybody that had ever come along before him.
02:27:18.000Yeah, it's all the things, whether it's music or art or any kind of art, and food and literature.
02:27:27.000All these different things just make life a richer experience because you're sharing in the way other people view and express themselves in the world.
02:27:34.000The way they view the world and the way they express themselves in the world.
02:27:37.000You share in that and you get a little bit of something.
02:27:40.000You get a little bit of an understanding of how they make you feel and then you're more aware of how you make other people feel because of that.
02:28:09.000It's almost like tricking us, the listener, through comedy of saying something that I agree with and then at the very last second going, ha!
02:28:19.000We actually agree with the person that you didn't agree with.
02:28:34.000I really enjoyed that aspect of being – there's a masterful, there's a maestro level of conducting of a crowd that I really, really love.
02:28:45.000I think there's something about how exciting it is to see a room full of people enjoying your food.
02:28:49.000I just think that it's like – You know, my brief stint when I was in high school theater.
02:28:55.000And when you got a line, when you got the line that you're like, this is a line that everybody goes on to laugh at, and knowing it, it's just like set up, knock it out, you know, is this feeling.
02:29:05.000And I remember I was at a Wu-Tang concert in London.
02:29:09.000And it's just like, to play a crowd like an instrument, to be able to sit there and go, everyone throw your hands up, boom.
02:29:58.000That's the one thing that's really amazing about this time is there's so much art.
02:30:02.000There's so much stuff that people have created that you have access to that can change your perceptions of life and that can enhance your perceptions of life and enhance the way you understand how human beings think and express themselves.
02:31:19.000Just take for a second to just sit there and say, what would you say to this person if your ultimate goal was to be kind first?
02:31:26.000How would you talk to this person if you had any concern about whether or not this person Would get there, would get, you would feel like pain from what you're saying.