Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is a lion of the food world,
Speaker 1: Andrew's Zimmer Andrew. Good to have nice to be here,
Speaker 1: Thanks Bob. So, how have you been coping with COVID?
Speaker 1: What's your life look like for the last eighteen months? Um?
Speaker 1: I think when when I when I hear the word
Speaker 1: coping and COVID in the same sentence, Uh, it makes
Speaker 1: me feel tired, sad and angry. Uh, tired because we've
Speaker 1: been working harder than we've had to to stay above water.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is that we've needed
Speaker 1: the help of our fellows, and I'm not sure we've
Speaker 1: gotten that. A percent. We've needed the help of our governments,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure we've gotten that. I think we've
Speaker 1: needed to come together in a way that is quite
Speaker 1: frankly been because Austin and we we haven't been able
Speaker 1: to achieve that as a nation. I thought this would
Speaker 1: be the kind of thing that would be an automatic. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, a a public health crisis, global public health crisis,
Speaker 1: and safety and wellness of our citizenry is government's number
Speaker 1: one obligation in my opinion. So tired, Uh, sad, I've
Speaker 1: lost I've lost friends, I've lost loved ones, I've lost businesses,
Speaker 1: I've lost money, I've lost time. I've lost so many
Speaker 1: things to this horrific uh pandemic. And UH angry because
Speaker 1: when I start talking about those first two, it just
Speaker 1: makes me really piste off. We we we we could
Speaker 1: have had this thing. And I mean that in the
Speaker 1: full expression of the colloquial sense in which I suggested.
Speaker 1: I mean, we really could have had this thing. Um.
Speaker 1: I was very publicly outspoken about the I even used
Speaker 1: the word genocide at one point with the Trump administrations
Speaker 1: handling of this uh pandemic in our country, although it
Speaker 1: did have very serious international implications, as we found out
Speaker 1: later when when tapes of the former president came out. Um.
Speaker 1: And I wasn't joking about that. I I you know,
Speaker 1: we we fumbled the ball, fumbled the ball, fumbled the ball. Uh,
Speaker 1: then we get a vaccine. Uh. And we're now in
Speaker 1: a situation with the delta variant where we're we see
Speaker 1: ourselves going down the exact same path that we did
Speaker 1: uh in uh you know, a year and a half ago.
Speaker 1: So UM, Yeah, tired, sad, and angry, Okay, let's break
Speaker 1: it down to the more micro level. Since the lockdown
Speaker 1: of March. Where have you been? Have you been still
Speaker 1: been in the Minnesota area? Has you traveled at all? Sure? Uh?
Speaker 1: I did the Bill Mar Show. I think the last
Speaker 1: weekend before the country shut down. Uh it was either
Speaker 1: the first uh weekend of March, end of February, beginning
Speaker 1: of March. I did the Mars show. Uh. There was
Speaker 1: no one in the audience. They didn't quite know what
Speaker 1: to do. They were about to go into lockdown. UM.
Speaker 1: I remember no one being on the streets in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: I remember coming home and was here for uh, you know,
Speaker 1: going back and forth between my home and my my
Speaker 1: private office. There was an advantage to having an office
Speaker 1: that's a huge loft space with uh four different doors
Speaker 1: uh going into it. It's a it's a one floor
Speaker 1: uh sort of little mini complex we have for all
Speaker 1: of our businesses. So we very quickly you know, masked
Speaker 1: signs tape on the floor, and three or four business
Speaker 1: leads and are controller in there every day, uh, trying
Speaker 1: to make sure that, um, you know, to keep our
Speaker 1: businesses to float. And you know, we had to downsize
Speaker 1: and you know, lost some businesses and and lost some
Speaker 1: business within the businesses that were open. UM. I've started
Speaker 1: traveling again in uh early summer, UH because we found
Speaker 1: a window and the ability to shoot some stuff outside
Speaker 1: that we could make some episodes of Family Dinner, my
Speaker 1: show for Magnolia and do it safely, UH, with testing
Speaker 1: with masks, with all of the precautions that were necessary
Speaker 1: to take and UH, you know, no one's sick. I'm
Speaker 1: super proud of the fact that our company we have
Speaker 1: a spotless record. UM. And and that includes the families
Speaker 1: that we worked with. I did one or two day
Speaker 1: trips to places during the summer. You know, I looked
Speaker 1: at some real estate and Nashville for a restaurant deal.
Speaker 1: I did you know, some other stuff like that. UH
Speaker 1: went out to l A and shot a bright shiny
Speaker 1: floor you know, game show for another network. UH, and
Speaker 1: did some stuff like that. UM. And went and visited
Speaker 1: my kid. You know that my son goes to school
Speaker 1: outside of the home in another state, and UH I
Speaker 1: was unable to see him. He was home, I guess
Speaker 1: for his last home visit. The beginning of February, right
Speaker 1: for COVID went went bonkers and they didn't allow kids
Speaker 1: to leave the facility or parents to pick up their
Speaker 1: kids for a a local visit until the end of June.
Speaker 1: And that was the longest I went without seeing my child. UM.
Speaker 1: And I know some people haven't seen their parents or
Speaker 1: other family members in in longer. UM. I only have
Speaker 1: my own experience. Those five months were absolutely brutal. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know I you know, no vacations, no nothing.
Speaker 1: We we shot a couple of things over the last
Speaker 1: couple of months. Uh. It's been nothing like our my
Speaker 1: regular travel schedule, that's for sure. Everything's been canceled and UH.
Speaker 1: And now I'm not so keen on traveling again until
Speaker 1: I see where this thing is going over the next
Speaker 1: couple of weeks, and certainly not to the places that
Speaker 1: we uh you know, typically find very easy uh pickings
Speaker 1: for shooting. UM, which is in a lot of states
Speaker 1: that offer us a lot of flexibility, but also happened
Speaker 1: to be ones that are exploding with outbreaks of real
Speaker 1: life cases of the Delta variant and shuttered hospitals and
Speaker 1: and story numbers. UM. We're in a Minnesota. By the way,
Speaker 1: I think rates is substantial on the CDC website in
Speaker 1: terms of UH uh exposure and caseload for the Delta variant. Uh,
Speaker 1: but we're in the orange, but we're not in the red. Okay,
Speaker 1: almost a non sequitur. You said you were on the
Speaker 1: Bill mar Show, and I watched the show and it's
Speaker 1: a fun show. Other than literally the experience. Do you
Speaker 1: find that gives you any benefit? Does it? You know,
Speaker 1: in the old days viewer on TV, everybody saw you
Speaker 1: in a world where only a couple of million people
Speaker 1: might see the number one readed network show. What's that like?
Speaker 1: Brilliant question. Um, some shows I do because they're fun
Speaker 1: and I want to do them. Uh. And it has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the exposure. You know. Sometimes people
Speaker 1: say to me, hey, would you do this show? Do
Speaker 1: you do that show? You're gonna get a lot of exposure,
Speaker 1: And I remind people that I have, you know, hundreds
Speaker 1: of hours of television available on an international streamer. That's
Speaker 1: you know, available in a hundred and seventy five countries
Speaker 1: around the world. Um. And I certainly am at that
Speaker 1: point in my career where I'm not doing things for
Speaker 1: for exposure. Um, the Mars Show, you have to remember,
Speaker 1: timing wise, my MSNBC show What's Eating America had just
Speaker 1: UH premiered two weeks beforehand, and so I wanted to
Speaker 1: promote that show to a very like minded audience. UM.
Speaker 1: I had done the Set Meyers Show, I had done
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other uh, you know, marketing and
Speaker 1: pr stuff around the MSNBC show UH in early February
Speaker 1: and late January, especially UH with jose Andres, who was
Speaker 1: the in the first episode with me. UM. And when
Speaker 1: I got the invite to do the mar Show as
Speaker 1: someone who watches it every weekend, it was an automatic. Yes.
Speaker 1: Bill is very food obsessed and very opinionated about the
Speaker 1: necessity for human beings to eat clean, healthy food, and
Speaker 1: he actually wanted to talk about things that other shows
Speaker 1: would rather not discuss, and I find that fascinating. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, fun these days in my career. If
Speaker 1: it's not fun, and if it's not with people that
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about talking to, sitting with, UH, visiting
Speaker 1: who are who are kind of into talking about ideas
Speaker 1: the way I am, I'm much less interested. What is
Speaker 1: the number one publicity vehicle to get your message out? UH? Great? Great,
Speaker 1: great question. UM. I would love to be UH doing
Speaker 1: more in in cable news because as noisy as that is,
Speaker 1: I know that a lot of people who deal with
Speaker 1: public policy and and the making of laws are watching
Speaker 1: those shows. And I believe if I do, if I
Speaker 1: rant for fifteen minutes in one of my shows on
Speaker 1: a lifestyle network about UH food policy or about uh
Speaker 1: you know, aquaculture or other things that I believe are
Speaker 1: are are vital or the necessity for a foods are
Speaker 1: a cabinet level position UH and pulling food out of
Speaker 1: AGG and and U S d A, f DA, etcetera. UM,
Speaker 1: I think that the percentage of people who are watching
Speaker 1: that lifestyle show do not that they want to be
Speaker 1: entertained by me, and they want me to be teaching
Speaker 1: them other things. And I believe when I'm doing my work,
Speaker 1: most notably on MSNBC of late, UM, I believe I
Speaker 1: have the greatest impact. And that's kind of what I'm
Speaker 1: looking to do uh these days. UM. And they are
Speaker 1: also you know, UH opportunities online in the digital space
Speaker 1: where you know, a good one minute clip of me
Speaker 1: UH talking about the something that I'm really impassionate about
Speaker 1: on certain websites, podcasts, etcetera. I think I have a
Speaker 1: tremendous opportunity to influence UH outcomes or a greater percentage
Speaker 1: of a chance to influence outcomes. Okay, there has been
Speaker 1: a lot of news about the impact of COVID in
Speaker 1: lockdowns on restaurants. UH. The latest news prior to this
Speaker 1: delta variant putting a huge question mark in was the
Speaker 1: ability to get help. So this is where you have
Speaker 1: a lot of expertise. What I'm asking you is to
Speaker 1: what degree have the restaurants and the restaurant industry been
Speaker 1: affected by this? To what degree can they get out?
Speaker 1: And what are the economics of a restaurant. I know
Speaker 1: some people that say, well, you know, they're asked to
Speaker 1: invest in restaurants in Los Angeles and they get reservations,
Speaker 1: but they're not looking to get their money back. Then
Speaker 1: you have Danny Meyer's got an empire. So what are
Speaker 1: the economics of the restaurant world? And then square that
Speaker 1: with both the economics during COVID and especially the help situation. Well,
Speaker 1: it's it's both those things are true at the same time.
Speaker 1: It's it's as if you could invest in a a
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift record and the latest Crosby record at the
Speaker 1: same time. You know, you're you're you're looking at two
Speaker 1: very different things, but both our music. Right. UM, let
Speaker 1: me let me take a step back and then bring
Speaker 1: up to this this question of what we're looking at
Speaker 1: now in terms of pay rate in restaurants, which is
Speaker 1: extremely extremely important piece of the puzzle. UM. When COVID
Speaker 1: went down and restaurants started to shut her, and we
Speaker 1: saw the writing on the wall, seventeen of us, then
Speaker 1: forty of us, on a series of emails and phone
Speaker 1: calls and and skype calls and then zooms over a
Speaker 1: two week period, co founded a group called the Independent
Speaker 1: Restaurant Coalition Save Restaurants dot com. Every One can go
Speaker 1: there and see everything that we've been up to. UM.
Speaker 1: Chief among us were some people from very diverse backgrounds.
Speaker 1: Uh Sam Cass uh incredible chef, but had also been
Speaker 1: uh former First Lady Michelle Obama's Uh foods are uh,
Speaker 1: Tom Collichio Jose Andres myself, Uh, the whole slew of
Speaker 1: incredible human beings. Um. But several of us, especially people
Speaker 1: like Tom Jose myself who had been talking for years
Speaker 1: about raising a hundred thousand dollars at the gala to
Speaker 1: dump that money into a bucket with two hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollar holes at the bottom of it, wasn't doing anything
Speaker 1: to advance the causes that were so near and dear
Speaker 1: to us. UH. Tom had started a Food Policy Action
Speaker 1: Committee a few years beforehand, and for him, politics was
Speaker 1: a love language. Jose Andres had founded World Central Kitchen
Speaker 1: a few years before UH, and for him, UH, it
Speaker 1: was feeding a hungry planet, especially those in crisis, was
Speaker 1: his love language. UM I was about educating human beings
Speaker 1: and and telling stories and changing hearts and minds with
Speaker 1: that storytelling. With the politics kicker on the end of it,
Speaker 1: and you know, with along with all the other folks
Speaker 1: who were involved U with us, we knew that we
Speaker 1: had to get federal funding for restaurants and we need
Speaker 1: to start working on it right away. So the i
Speaker 1: r C was founded with a very very simple premise
Speaker 1: protect independent restaurants UH and do so by making sure
Speaker 1: that we were getting laws passed on Capitol Hill. So
Speaker 1: first UH we worked to get the p p P.
Speaker 1: Then we worked to change the p p P. Thanks
Speaker 1: to UH Republican Chip Roy of Texas and Democrat Dean
Speaker 1: Phillips of Minnesota who pushed the p p P change legislation.
Speaker 1: It fixed a Swiss horrible piece of legislation, actually made
Speaker 1: it work for some people. And then we went to
Speaker 1: work with UH Senators uh wicker And and Cinema and
Speaker 1: Earl Blueman, our Congressman of Oregon, and UH they drafted
Speaker 1: Earl drafted the Restaurant Relief Act Restaurants Act, excuse me,
Speaker 1: and the Restaurants Act. We had done a lot of
Speaker 1: work and invested tons of money on a lot of
Speaker 1: economic studies to see exactly how much money was needed.
Speaker 1: We came up with a figure of a hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty billion the OMB, a whole bunch of other independent
Speaker 1: studies I think Mackenzie had done one as well, a
Speaker 1: bunch of other big accounting firms had done them. Everyone
Speaker 1: came up with roughly the same number. Cost a hundred
Speaker 1: twenty billion dollars to save restaurants. But that would be
Speaker 1: worthwhile because you know, independent restaurants would lose a quarter
Speaker 1: of a trillion dollars just through the last three quarters
Speaker 1: of that year. UM. So it seemed like the easiest
Speaker 1: thing to do. Let's let's get those restaurants back stopped,
Speaker 1: UM so that we would have those restaurants to return
Speaker 1: to whenever UH this thing ended and restaurants could fully open.
Speaker 1: That never happened until finally, with some last minute wrangling
Speaker 1: and thanks to some incredible work from some of our
Speaker 1: members UH Centator Schumer included or got included twenty five
Speaker 1: point nine billion dollars into the Restaurant Relief Fund administered
Speaker 1: by the s b A in the America Cares Act,
Speaker 1: which was the big tranche that the Biden administration passed
Speaker 1: UH earlier this year. Now, the s b A opened
Speaker 1: and it took applications for UH for these forgivable loans
Speaker 1: and grants, and they took on eight billion dollars, rounding
Speaker 1: up from seventy nine points something eighty billion dollars in applications.
Speaker 1: They only had twenty five point nine billion to give out. UH.
Speaker 1: So there is a substantial number of people who have
Speaker 1: applied for this, deserving of it been approved, who were
Speaker 1: sitting here waiting for money. So the I r C
Speaker 1: is desperately trying to get that Restaurant Relief Fund refilled.
Speaker 1: It is of vital importance. If we don't, we're going
Speaker 1: to have an economic tragedy of what I fear will
Speaker 1: be biblical proportions, and here's why, and then we'll get
Speaker 1: to the cost of doing business with the employees. The
Speaker 1: independent restaurants, when you pull them on together, pull them
Speaker 1: all together, are the second largest business in America behind
Speaker 1: only behind the US government. UH. It is a trillion
Speaker 1: and a half dollar industry, represents about five and a
Speaker 1: half percent of g d P. But it only keep
Speaker 1: seven percent of the money that flows through it. And
Speaker 1: of that seven percent, well over half of it is
Speaker 1: put back into the business buying broken glass, replacing broken glasses,
Speaker 1: broken dishwashers, stuff like that. So it is an incredible
Speaker 1: vital piece of turnaround money economics. UH. And restaurant taxes
Speaker 1: also go to give municipalities to buy books for schools
Speaker 1: and paint lines on roads and put new lights on
Speaker 1: main Street and all that other stuff. Restaurants are also
Speaker 1: vital to the tourism industry. They're vital to the cultural
Speaker 1: identity of main street America. UH And most importantly, because
Speaker 1: I believe that that everything is about people. When you
Speaker 1: look at the people that are employed in restaurants, where
Speaker 1: the number one employer of single moms, number one employer
Speaker 1: of single dads, number one employer of returning citizens, those
Speaker 1: coming back from jails and institutions, number one UH first
Speaker 1: time UH job provider and now most recently the number
Speaker 1: one last job provider. UM. It is a depending on
Speaker 1: whose stats you look at, the number one or number
Speaker 1: two for immigrants and new arrivals to this country. So
Speaker 1: you can see this is a very very special population.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna go leave a restaurant and the next
Speaker 1: week go to work at Ernst and Young. It's just
Speaker 1: not how it happens. It is a vital population that
Speaker 1: needs these jobs. The if you look at the supply chain,
Speaker 1: all the food and the goods and the booze and
Speaker 1: everything else that goes into a restaurant. Uh, the impact
Speaker 1: on our economy isn't limited just to that trillion and
Speaker 1: a half dollars and that five percent of g d P.
Speaker 1: It multiplies by three or four times. Quick little fact,
Speaker 1: just to to justify my point making UM, seventy five
Speaker 1: cent of fish and seafood harvest did in America in
Speaker 1: all our coasts, by all of our fishing industries is
Speaker 1: sold in restaurants. Right, That's where the majority of people
Speaker 1: eat their seafood. So just the impact on the American
Speaker 1: seafood industry. You're taking away eight When when restaurants were closed, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, four or five months into COVID, UH, the
Speaker 1: American fishing industry literally came to a halt. Just to
Speaker 1: give you an idea, that's where you saw it. By
Speaker 1: the way, those tragic pictures on the cover of the
Speaker 1: New York Times of the zucchini farm in a Maacoli, Florida,
Speaker 1: or the lettuce uh farm in the Salinas Valley literally
Speaker 1: tilling under the fruit and vegetables as far as the
Speaker 1: eye could see because there's no one, no one to
Speaker 1: pick it, and no place to sell it into, and
Speaker 1: no one to ship it truck it right. It's is
Speaker 1: an incredible, incredible impact on our nation's economy. And when
Speaker 1: restaurants closed, So when restaurants reopened more vigorously a couple
Speaker 1: of months ago, and some were getting federal bunnies and
Speaker 1: some had been able to finatal things with p p P,
Speaker 1: the vast majority had taken on a ton of debt,
Speaker 1: everything from people who in a little pizza parlor who
Speaker 1: had maxed out their credit cards to UH savvy restaurateurs
Speaker 1: who've been able with their track record to get loans
Speaker 1: from banks. Everyone took on a staggering amount of debt,
Speaker 1: gambling that they were either going to get relief from
Speaker 1: the government in form of the restaurant refund being top
Speaker 1: back golf, or they were going to be able to
Speaker 1: open fully. Now you have to remember even those restaurants
Speaker 1: that were open fully, and I walked by some in
Speaker 1: my hometown and was like, Wow, they're doing great business.
Speaker 1: But I also knew that they had taken on a
Speaker 1: year and a half of debt and they missed a
Speaker 1: year and a half of profit, and to make that
Speaker 1: up would take five or six years of being full
Speaker 1: all the time just to get back to zero, just
Speaker 1: get back to where they were at the end of
Speaker 1: beginning of One of the things is that UH folks
Speaker 1: never saw coming with COVID UH was the the human
Speaker 1: capacity for enduring pain and misery and coming up with
Speaker 1: a better solution for their own lives. And I believe
Speaker 1: that and the low pay and some of the toxic
Speaker 1: UH issues surrounding the restaurant business are the two biggest
Speaker 1: reasons that we are struggling to find people to work
Speaker 1: in restaurants. UM. So many people who were servers, bussers,
Speaker 1: hosts and hostess bar backs, uh line cooks, dishwashers, simply
Speaker 1: found a different way to make a living. And as
Speaker 1: things went on during COVID, they realized, wow, this is
Speaker 1: this is pretty good for my lifestyle, or or I've
Speaker 1: changed what I'm doing. Um, I've found another way to
Speaker 1: supplement my life. Remember a lot of people in the
Speaker 1: restaurant industry are lifers. They're they're devoted to restaurants. They're
Speaker 1: always gonna work in restaurants. They love restaurants. But the
Speaker 1: vast majority of them are actually they're temporarily their college
Speaker 1: students moving on to something else. They're actors in New York,
Speaker 1: their musicians in Nashville, right, Um, they're doing something else
Speaker 1: in transitioning. So people found a better and different way.
Speaker 1: And I believe very very strongly that a lot of
Speaker 1: people were working in restaurants that we were unbalanced, where
Speaker 1: there was no vacation pay, there was no health benefits,
Speaker 1: there was no types of insurance there there there wasn't
Speaker 1: a professionalized atmosphere within the restaurants they were working in,
Speaker 1: and they felt that those issues were toxic to their
Speaker 1: returning that decided to make a career switch. I have
Speaker 1: seen now. I was just on a two weeks ago,
Speaker 1: was on an interview and with Tom Collegio. And the
Speaker 1: reason I bring him up is that extremely famous chef
Speaker 1: with you know, a half dozen restaurants around the country, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe more um and someone who very much uh is
Speaker 1: at the the tip of the iceberg when it comes
Speaker 1: to fame and and also skill set, an incredible chef,
Speaker 1: incredibly talented. Right before we went on, he was telling
Speaker 1: me that, UM, he was only open I think at
Speaker 1: that point Wednesday through Sunday. Uh. And the reason was is, uh,
Speaker 1: he couldn't find enough staff. And there were some people
Speaker 1: in this position who actually found that their restaurant in
Speaker 1: their own lifestyle function better than being open seven days.
Speaker 1: They were willing to do less money and keep a
Speaker 1: little bit themselves and find it easier to manage. I
Speaker 1: know of a lot of local restaurants here in the
Speaker 1: Twin Cities, obviously, and I speak to more restaurant owners
Speaker 1: here in the Twin Cities on a regular basis that
Speaker 1: I do anywhere else. But we're a big modern metro uh.
Speaker 1: And by the way, in summertime where people can sit outside,
Speaker 1: they're all off there. Only there some are open limited hours.
Speaker 1: They've limited their menus so that they could shrink the
Speaker 1: number of people on their staff. It is a huge,
Speaker 1: uh crisis. The employment crisis and restaurants is very real. UM,
Speaker 1: I do happen to believe, uh, like uh some other
Speaker 1: people in my industry, UM that a level setting of
Speaker 1: hourly and salary employees, a level setting of the tipping mechanisms,
Speaker 1: a level set, level setting of guests charges. In other words,
Speaker 1: letting everybody in the restaurant profit equally from this success
Speaker 1: is of vital, vital, vital importance. Okay, Denny made that.
Speaker 1: You know, we included the service me then after COVID
Speaker 1: got eliminated. Uh, I know him, but very you know
Speaker 1: a fraction. Have you spoke with him in terms of
Speaker 1: how that worked before the COVID? Was it working for him? Yeah, well, Danny,
Speaker 1: I've I've known Danny for twenty five years and I
Speaker 1: consider him a good friend and uh we do speak
Speaker 1: and uh he is someone who I consider to be
Speaker 1: uh one of the brightest, uh smartest business people and
Speaker 1: human beings I've ever met in the restaurant business or elsewhere.
Speaker 1: He also is one of the folks. If he's not
Speaker 1: the leading light. He's one of the two or three
Speaker 1: leading lights in our industry. Everyone looks at what Danny
Speaker 1: does in his businesses um uh and his book Setting
Speaker 1: the Table is probably the only mandatory piece of reading
Speaker 1: and the restaurant business that I reckon. When everyone says,
Speaker 1: what's the one thing I should read, I said, you
Speaker 1: read Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. It's the It's
Speaker 1: the best book about restaurants and hospital so much so
Speaker 1: that there you know our business leaders who who make
Speaker 1: it mandatory reading for their C suite people, they're not
Speaker 1: even in the food business. It's a it's a really
Speaker 1: brilliant book I recommended for everyone. Danny several years ago,
Speaker 1: pre covid H, decided to experiment with service charges and
Speaker 1: doing away with tipping. He was, like many other things,
Speaker 1: way ahead of his time, too much, too soon, and
Speaker 1: without other people doing it in the industry, was very,
Speaker 1: very confusing to consumers. So Danny went back to tips. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other issue that restaurants have charged. I'm being completely
Speaker 1: transparent here is someone who is a partner in several
Speaker 1: restaurant groups and invest in restaurants himself and talks to
Speaker 1: a lot of restaurant owners. People had talked about doing
Speaker 1: this pre COVID again, because it is very crucial. Restaurants
Speaker 1: have not been able to charge what food really costs
Speaker 1: on a plate for many, any many decades. They've been
Speaker 1: artificially deflating their prod uh, the their what they charged
Speaker 1: their prices on their menu and trying to make it
Speaker 1: up at the bar. You've probably heard this colloquially at
Speaker 1: dinner parties a lot for anyone who's invest in restaurant. Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do at the bar. We're gonna do fifty
Speaker 1: percent of revenue from our bar. We're gonna make a
Speaker 1: bar that happens to serve food and every other version
Speaker 1: of that and in every because your profit margins are
Speaker 1: higher and there's less waste than all the rest of
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, and you need fewer people to
Speaker 1: serve liquor than you do to serve food. Uh. But fascinatingly, um,
Speaker 1: right before COVID, a lot of restaurateurs were calling me
Speaker 1: to explore the idea of what it would take to
Speaker 1: go with a service charge, And in talking to them,
Speaker 1: the one thing they all had in common was they
Speaker 1: all believe they would lose a lot of employees, they
Speaker 1: would have to go to restricted hours for a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks or a month as they onboarded new employees.
Speaker 1: Right as you in board those new employees who have
Speaker 1: different expectations of dollars, you can then retrain your staff.
Speaker 1: That's a huge expense for a restaurant. One of the
Speaker 1: biggest expenses restaurants have, uh independent restaurants is that is
Speaker 1: the dollars takes to train and on board a new employee,
Speaker 1: and the the old employees would leave because a server
Speaker 1: that was making a good night is now gonna make
Speaker 1: twenty five and a good night and he's gonna be
Speaker 1: sharing money with other people and taking less for himself.
Speaker 1: So those people tend to leave and go to another
Speaker 1: restaurant that isn't implementing service charges. So a lot of
Speaker 1: people shied away from it. COVID put everyone in the
Speaker 1: same boat. And so now that we're out of COVID,
Speaker 1: I would say the majority of restaurants that I've been
Speaker 1: in in the last five six months, uh and that's
Speaker 1: uh four months that I've been dining out. Uh. The
Speaker 1: I would say the restaurants that I go to all
Speaker 1: have a service charge on them. We just in Minnesota
Speaker 1: today one of our the Twin cities most beloved newcomers.
Speaker 1: A and by the way, this place that serves hamburgers
Speaker 1: uh and ice cream and French fries. That's not a
Speaker 1: fancy restaurant UH called baby Zito's, just beloved by Minnesota's
Speaker 1: hot new place. Everyone loves it. Have you had their burger?
Speaker 1: Have you had their ice cream? Run by incredible young people,
Speaker 1: really impassion just announced that they're going to a service
Speaker 1: charge of eighteen percent so that they can share the
Speaker 1: money with all of their employees and and actually get
Speaker 1: the economics of their own business right. And you're seeing
Speaker 1: this more and more and more. And the reason is,
Speaker 1: we have to pay our employees better. We have to
Speaker 1: offer them paid sick leave, we have to offer them
Speaker 1: some form of insurance that they earn into. We have
Speaker 1: to professionalize and get those dollars up for these employees
Speaker 1: because so many of them have been kicked in the
Speaker 1: butt by artificially depressed wages. And the reason that restaurants
Speaker 1: can't pay the same dollars that other businesses do is
Speaker 1: because they haven't been able to charge what that plate
Speaker 1: of chicken really costs on the plate. For decades and
Speaker 1: decades because no one, because the American consumer, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've heard this before from from other thought leaders,
Speaker 1: is hooked on cheap fast food. And I don't just mean, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the McDonald's of the world. You know, Americans
Speaker 1: believe that, you know, a red piece of red meat
Speaker 1: that's eight to twelve ounces should only cost them X
Speaker 1: number of dollars and come with the giant baked potato
Speaker 1: and a salad bar. And they're not factoring in what
Speaker 1: that food really cost to get to the table, what
Speaker 1: it costs to be planted, picked, trucked, prepped, stored, cooked
Speaker 1: and served and cleaned up after that plate of food.
Speaker 1: Dining in restaurants is a more expensive proposition. As we
Speaker 1: want this huge moment in American history where food is
Speaker 1: the new rock right where we've we've never had. There's
Speaker 1: no culture in America, no culture in the world that
Speaker 1: has had a more romantic relationship ever with food that
Speaker 1: America has in the last ten, twelve, fifteen years. But
Speaker 1: we're not willing to pay for it. And now the
Speaker 1: swallows have returned to Capistrano, and in the spirit of
Speaker 1: tortured metaphors everywhere, it's time to pay the piper. Okay,
Speaker 1: you mentioned all these household names. Certainly two people paying attention, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Tom Collickio Jose Andres. I gotta ask you
Speaker 1: some of these people, certainly Bobby Flay seems to be
Speaker 1: on food television seven. To what degree is their camaraderie
Speaker 1: and to what degree is their competition both? I think
Speaker 1: it's like any other business. You know, food people are
Speaker 1: the best people in the whole world. I really truly
Speaker 1: believe that I'd rather be with food people than any
Speaker 1: other human beings on planet Earth. If I'm with uh,
Speaker 1: food people who are recovering addicts and alcoholics as well,
Speaker 1: that to me is the the apex of human being.
Speaker 1: But I have a lot of personal bias there. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there is a ton of mutual respect to
Speaker 1: some people not like each other. Of course, it's just
Speaker 1: like anywhere else. Um, But there's a ton of respect
Speaker 1: because you have to work really hard, uh to get
Speaker 1: to a place of achievement uh in the food world,
Speaker 1: and it's even harder to stay there. I think people
Speaker 1: unfairly criticized people like Bobby Flay. I'll just use him
Speaker 1: as as an example. I've heard things from friends of
Speaker 1: mine like, well, he can't really be a good cookies
Speaker 1: on TV. He's actually one of the most phenomenal chefs cooks.
Speaker 1: When he actually touches food, he's he's an incredible, incredible craftsperson.
Speaker 1: Same thing with Tom Callikio. There's a whole generation of
Speaker 1: people who only think of Callikio as someone who turns
Speaker 1: to Podma when she's ready to tell folks to pack
Speaker 1: their knives and go home. It's one of the greatest
Speaker 1: chefs of his generation. Um. These are people who I
Speaker 1: believe thirty years from now will still be talked about
Speaker 1: for their cuisine at the same time that camaraderie. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, there's only so many TV stations they're willing
Speaker 1: to put people on. There's only so many customers, there's
Speaker 1: only so many fannies to go in so many seats.
Speaker 1: There's only so many hotels that will give a chef
Speaker 1: a deal and take their one or two units and
Speaker 1: turn it into ten. Um. So obviously there's a lot
Speaker 1: of healthy competition. UM. I don't think there's any competition
Speaker 1: for people like Jose andres Uh. Josiandre's is uh to
Speaker 1: me uh in rarefied air. Um. Not only is he
Speaker 1: one of the handful I'm talking about Top thirty forty
Speaker 1: best chefs in the world, Top fifty for sure. I
Speaker 1: don't get an argument from from anyone. His skill set
Speaker 1: is legendary. Um, we're talking three star Michelin. But can
Speaker 1: also put together a sandwich on his vegetarian food truck
Speaker 1: Tomato as well as anyone. Um. But he's also created
Speaker 1: a a a global UH network for help with his
Speaker 1: nonprofit World Central Kitchen. That I mean he was. He
Speaker 1: was one of the three finalists for a Nobel Peace
Speaker 1: Prize this year. For gosh sakes, first time a chef
Speaker 1: has ever been a finalist for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Speaker 1: And I hope people understand because of the unique aspects
Speaker 1: and talent sets that this community of culinarians has. It's
Speaker 1: why I really want to see UH, someone with a
Speaker 1: food background become our first foods are And I really
Speaker 1: hope before his time as president ends, whether that's one
Speaker 1: or two terms, UH, that our current president UH adds
Speaker 1: a cabinet level position UH to deal with food in
Speaker 1: America because it is that big an issue. It touches everything.
Speaker 1: You know, we're in a state of permanent climate emergency.
Speaker 1: We're in a permanent state of hunger and waste emergency
Speaker 1: in this country, all related to food. The immigration issues
Speaker 1: in America, the largest number of illegal immigrants work in
Speaker 1: the food business, and and the legal migrants come in
Speaker 1: on visa programs that are managed by a group that
Speaker 1: doesn't understand food. And so consequently, I believe that all
Speaker 1: those things, lumped together, as well as a dozen other
Speaker 1: issues we can talk about, make it a requirement that
Speaker 1: we established a cabinet level secretary position around food. Okay,
Speaker 1: that foods are you talk about all these issues of production,
Speaker 1: et cetera. How about something that's been bandied about a
Speaker 1: lot in terms of consumption. You're old enough to remember
Speaker 1: in the Reagan era when it's school lunches, catch up
Speaker 1: was considered a vegetable. So the issue of what people
Speaker 1: are consuming, these big multinationals, they literally we have people
Speaker 1: creating what is commonly referred to as junk food to
Speaker 1: be addictive. Okay, so on some level you can't even
Speaker 1: blame the consumer. Can this be turned around? Can of
Speaker 1: foods are do something? Or is it's just too late? No,
Speaker 1: it's not well for the for a national school lunch program,
Speaker 1: it's not too late. In fact, we're seeing it. I
Speaker 1: think we're up to uh fourteen states now that have
Speaker 1: taken it upon themselves to pass legislation UH requiring all
Speaker 1: schools to provide food free of charge to students. And
Speaker 1: that's the first step. What I'm insisting on is a
Speaker 1: two step process. I would like food two or three
Speaker 1: meals a day uh to be because it's the place
Speaker 1: to feed kids. Well, let's let's back up one second.
Speaker 1: We have a hunger crisis in America. We had it
Speaker 1: beaten down to of human beings that were food insecure,
Speaker 1: which I think is a bullshit piece of terminology. I
Speaker 1: think it's too areadite. It's called hunger of Americans were hungry,
Speaker 1: they didn't know where their next day's meals were coming from.
Speaker 1: COVID dropped another fifty of human beings below the poverty line,
Speaker 1: So now many of those are hungry. I believe we're backup.
Speaker 1: Statistics say twenty uh to I think realistically the number
Speaker 1: is more like thirty uh. But even those that are
Speaker 1: eating are not eating well. To your point, they're buying
Speaker 1: their food at dollar general stores. We profiled all these
Speaker 1: stories in my MSNBC show What's eating America. I could
Speaker 1: cite you chapter and verse on the explosion of these
Speaker 1: dollar general stores that do not sell fresh fruit, fresh vegetables,
Speaker 1: produced fruit, meats, etcetera. Uh, they sell process food. It's
Speaker 1: it's like a a cheap dollar store version of the
Speaker 1: center of the super market is supposed the perimeter where
Speaker 1: all the fresh food is for kids. I think it's
Speaker 1: it's I mean, look, hungry children in America are no
Speaker 1: longer a national embarrassment or a shameful piece of our
Speaker 1: current situation. I believe it's a criminal situation. Hungry children
Speaker 1: in the richest, most successful country in the history of civilization,
Speaker 1: to me, is a criminal act. To keep children hungry
Speaker 1: as a criminal act. The solutions are widely available. We
Speaker 1: have the skill in this country to fix the problem.
Speaker 1: We do not have the political will currently to fix
Speaker 1: this problem. And this is not red or blue, or
Speaker 1: left or right. This has been an issue like the
Speaker 1: immigration reform that is so desperately needed, that has been
Speaker 1: kicked down the road. Uh, you know, like an old
Speaker 1: tin can for thirty five or forty years, going back
Speaker 1: as you so, you know the reaganeer, a ketchup is
Speaker 1: a vegetable, right, so what do we have to do.
Speaker 1: We have to makes school lunch free for everyone. We
Speaker 1: have to start cooking again in schools. You and I
Speaker 1: are of the same generation. When I was young and
Speaker 1: was in school, there were lunch ladies and they actually
Speaker 1: had tilt skillets and giants saw tape, and they actually
Speaker 1: made food, uh and it and and it came from
Speaker 1: There were boxes with heads of lettuce that were cut
Speaker 1: up that went into a salad bar. And you know
Speaker 1: that that Salsbury steak sometimes tasted like a hockey puck,
Speaker 1: but it was made with fresh meat and real ingredients
Speaker 1: and what we call whole foods. Right, they weren't empty calories. Now,
Speaker 1: even in public schools that are offering free lunch, so
Speaker 1: much of the food that's being uh served there are
Speaker 1: empty calories. And because the laws in this country say
Speaker 1: that kids have to have a certain number of calories,
Speaker 1: the easiest way to make the number up if you're
Speaker 1: putting healthy food, fruits, vegetable salads, lean meats on a tray.
Speaker 1: The way that these schools get around so laws is
Speaker 1: stick a caramel roll onto the corner of the tray
Speaker 1: and you've you've got your caloric intake number. We're poisoning
Speaker 1: our children. Kids who don't eat well in school are tired,
Speaker 1: they don't get good grades, their outcomes are are less successful.
Speaker 1: This is statistics that I mean. You know, it's very
Speaker 1: easy to access from the biggest and most reliable UH
Speaker 1: institutions in the country. The pew UH Foundation does incredible
Speaker 1: research UH in this regard um it is. It is horrific.
Speaker 1: And I will add this to that. Anywhere I've I've
Speaker 1: been screaming this from the mountaintop for twenty years. Any
Speaker 1: place that the public dollar intersects with food, we are
Speaker 1: under serving the people that need the hug that good
Speaker 1: food h gives. Public hospitals, public senior centers, public schools,
Speaker 1: UH jails, institutions. These people need good, healthy food to
Speaker 1: help them recover, live respectfully, get better outcomes in the
Speaker 1: cases of kids, lower recidivism rates, the cases of people
Speaker 1: who are incarcerated. The warm hug that food gives. That's
Speaker 1: talked about in the center fold of those food magazines
Speaker 1: where there's like that ten million dollar house in Nantucket
Speaker 1: and all the wonderful red, white and blue pley, the
Speaker 1: golden retriever, you know, roving around and piles of lobster
Speaker 1: and clams. That's a fantasy. That is for the one
Speaker 1: tenth of the one percent we have of the population
Speaker 1: in this country that need the hug and the nutrition
Speaker 1: that good food gets, and we we have the ability
Speaker 1: to give it to them. We just don't have the
Speaker 1: political will right now to make that a reality. And
Speaker 1: that's why I'm working so hard to make that a
Speaker 1: reality by trying to talk to politicians, tell these stories,
Speaker 1: you know, my MSNBC series What's Eating America out there
Speaker 1: and talking about this on shows like yours, because it's
Speaker 1: vitally important for people to understand that, you know, as
Speaker 1: the late great center of Paul Wellstone, my political mentor
Speaker 1: here in Minnesota, used to say, we all win when
Speaker 1: we all win, and if we want, if we want
Speaker 1: to fulfill the promise of this great nation, we have
Speaker 1: to start feeding people properly. We just have to to
Speaker 1: not do so is is criminal dereliction. Okay, But one
Speaker 1: thing we know is it's expensive to eat healthy. So
Speaker 1: it's easy. It's cheaper to eat at rallies than to
Speaker 1: make a fresh meal at home. And in an addition,
Speaker 1: if you it takes time. Okay, In addition, if you're
Speaker 1: Oprah and you have a private chef, it's amazing what
Speaker 1: they can make taste good, but we also know their
Speaker 1: costs involved. Is there any way to make healthy food
Speaker 1: more economically available to people who are challenged financially? Of
Speaker 1: course there is, and there's tremendous their tremendous programs out
Speaker 1: there in the school lunch front. Uh, you know, challenged
Speaker 1: with that same problem. Hey, there's no way for a
Speaker 1: dollar seventy nine a meal, you know, or whatever it
Speaker 1: is that the public schools at Can you make a healthy,
Speaker 1: nutritious meal for kids that they'll eat well. Chef Dan Jiusti,
Speaker 1: who was the Chef de cuisine at Noma when it
Speaker 1: was America the world's number one restaurant, started a group
Speaker 1: called Brigade B R I G A I d UH
Speaker 1: in the UH Northeast. He's based, I believe, out of Connecticut,
Speaker 1: UM and his company is now working with public schools
Speaker 1: I think in three or four states and has proved
Speaker 1: that you can by buying smart and preparing fresh, uh,
Speaker 1: you can do it and still meet the economic requirements.
Speaker 1: It does require extra investment from the government, but what
Speaker 1: better use of our funds? And I don't want to
Speaker 1: use the old cliche, uh, you know, let's have more
Speaker 1: bake sales and fewer aircraft carriers. But that cliche was
Speaker 1: true for a reason. I think we do overspend in
Speaker 1: a lot of areas that we don't need to overspend in.
Speaker 1: Where just a few hundred billion dollars a year, and
Speaker 1: I know that's a big amount of money, but when
Speaker 1: you compare it to some of the costs of things
Speaker 1: we're wasting so much money on, becomes a drop in
Speaker 1: the bucket. And I also will say this, Bob, that
Speaker 1: we have skewed the food system in this country to
Speaker 1: reward the farm to freighter agricultural community. Giant agribusinesses that
Speaker 1: grow seed corn and soybeans and cotton and all the
Speaker 1: rest of that are the ones that get what are
Speaker 1: now insurance incentitives, incentives that are also called subsidies. Right.
Speaker 1: It's it's just transferred over into crop insurance and stuff.
Speaker 1: They're able to farm ten thousand acres with just five
Speaker 1: to ten employees because they're driving these giant behemoth machines
Speaker 1: that plant and picked the food food fit for human consumption.
Speaker 1: All of it has been legally labeled. This is why
Speaker 1: we needed. Foods are has been legally labeled a specialty
Speaker 1: crop so they can't get crop insurance right. And yes,
Speaker 1: in a sense it is especially great. It has to
Speaker 1: be picked by You can't a machine can't pick a
Speaker 1: tomato or a great has to be picked by hand.
Speaker 1: Let us has to be picked by hand. Payers have
Speaker 1: to be picked by hand. But if we could invest
Speaker 1: in food, what better thing to invest in then feeding Americans.
Speaker 1: It is the to me, it is a no brainer.
Speaker 1: That's where we should be investing. And if we invested
Speaker 1: federal moneys and subsidized farmers who were raising food for
Speaker 1: human consumption to the same degree that we're allowing insurance
Speaker 1: subsidies for these farms to freighter economy farmers, uh, the
Speaker 1: system would literally self correct all by itself. If we
Speaker 1: invest in real nutritious food. We've just done the opposite.
Speaker 1: You know, we all know we've heard that that point.
Speaker 1: It's true. Seventy of the food in America is produced
Speaker 1: by the same seven companies. We're destroying our biospheres with
Speaker 1: these giant agri businesses. All of the runoff from those
Speaker 1: farms and those chicken uh, giant chicken farms and feed
Speaker 1: lots where the cows are standing in their own filth
Speaker 1: goes into our water system. We never had algae blooms
Speaker 1: to the degree that we do now. Uh, stifling algae
Speaker 1: blooms that kill off huge swaths of our coastal fishing zone. UM.
Speaker 1: Until we started interesting these chemicals into the waters. We
Speaker 1: can literally trace them from the Gulf into farms in
Speaker 1: the giant agri businesses in the Midwest. Because all of
Speaker 1: that filth is going into the rivers like the Mississippi
Speaker 1: and dumping into the Gulf. We need someone with common
Speaker 1: sense ruling the roost. Here. Foods are for the wind.
Speaker 1: From time immemorial, there's been the image of the tyrant,
Speaker 1: abusive chef. All of a sudden seen comes along. We
Speaker 1: have the me too era Mario Batali, let's use the
Speaker 1: word was outed. What is really going on? And will
Speaker 1: progress be made? Has progress been made? An amazing amount
Speaker 1: of progress has been made, and it requires a lot
Speaker 1: more progress. That toxic environment that I talked about before,
Speaker 1: the part that relates to this question is often referred
Speaker 1: to as toxic masculinity and restaurants. UM. You know, the
Speaker 1: the majority of chefs in America for generations have been
Speaker 1: uh you know, old white men, and they have been
Speaker 1: allowed uh societally, culturally, uh to create environments that are
Speaker 1: uh unfair, uh in many ways, illegal in many ways,
Speaker 1: and toxic in many ways. UM. Let's start with pay structure.
Speaker 1: It's it's ridiculous that the you know, a active man
Speaker 1: or woman at twenty something up at the front of
Speaker 1: the host and makes thirty dollars an hour and a
Speaker 1: dish dishwasher makes eight nine or ten and worse, eight
Speaker 1: nine or ten under the table with no benefits. UM,
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous the amount of uh. And this is something
Speaker 1: that has been a problem in our industry for a
Speaker 1: long time, and I think it's unfair when people say that,
Speaker 1: uh it's no longer a problem. It's a problem. Alcohol,
Speaker 1: drugs and mental health issues in the restaurant community is
Speaker 1: at a number that is, depending on who study you
Speaker 1: look at, uh six seven percent higher than it is
Speaker 1: in the in the rest of our population. UM. I'm
Speaker 1: working with an organization out of Atlanta called the Giving
Speaker 1: Kitchen UH working on their alcoholism and addiction programs as
Speaker 1: they roll out these programs into other states to try
Speaker 1: to help people because the restaurants have done a really
Speaker 1: lousy job of doing it. If you work at you know, uh,
Speaker 1: the company down the road and you're having mental health issues,
Speaker 1: rugger alcoholism problems, you can actually get your company to
Speaker 1: help you with the HR department will help you access treatment, etcetera.
Speaker 1: It's one of those places that restaurants, despite being a
Speaker 1: trillion and a half dollar industry, are hundreds of thousands,
Speaker 1: six hundred seventy, six hundred and eighty thousand, to be exact, uh, independent,
Speaker 1: little micro businesses, some of them very small, couple hundred
Speaker 1: grand a year little mom and pop Delhi on a
Speaker 1: tiny little town on Main Street, or that twenty million
Speaker 1: dollar a year restaurants in New York City or Los
Speaker 1: Angeles that everyone is dying to get into, and everything
Speaker 1: in between. We need to service our employees better, We
Speaker 1: need to take better care of them, and we need
Speaker 1: to understand that the byproducts of decades of decades and decades,
Speaker 1: and in this country four hundred and two years of
Speaker 1: white privilege has created toxic levels of intolerance in many
Speaker 1: businesses all across America, and restaurants are no exception to
Speaker 1: this rule. Um, but restaurants can fix themselves faster than
Speaker 1: big corporations, and what we've seen is incredible leaders uh
Speaker 1: in all states. I mean I could start naming names
Speaker 1: and and never stop. We don't have time to list them.
Speaker 1: All of people who have created open source playbooks for
Speaker 1: retraining employees, for managing restaurants, for instituting profit sharing and
Speaker 1: coop based revenue systems, who have figured out ways to
Speaker 1: to pay people better than a living wage, uh, so
Speaker 1: that people don't have to have two or three jobs
Speaker 1: to uh, you know, put a roof over their family's
Speaker 1: head and feed them uh and pay for the basic necessities.
Speaker 1: And still doing it in the restaurant industry, I think
Speaker 1: one of the silver linings. And I hate talking about
Speaker 1: this topic. I almost feel guilty, and I know I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get a lot of letters about it. The fact
Speaker 1: of the matter is is that while COVID has kneecapped
Speaker 1: our industry and has destroyed, you know, put thirty percent
Speaker 1: of it out of business, and maybe more now with
Speaker 1: this explosion of the delta variant, the one saving grace,
Speaker 1: uh is that I think twenty years from now, when
Speaker 1: we have the numbers and we're gonna be able to
Speaker 1: look back and realize that it was in knock on Wood.
Speaker 1: Things don't get too much worse that we literally shifted
Speaker 1: from doing business and restaurants one way to a variety
Speaker 1: of other business models that actually worked better, were fairer
Speaker 1: for everyone, and didn't just reward the few, but instead
Speaker 1: rewarded the all. And I don't mean that in the
Speaker 1: commonly when whenever I talked about these people immediately start
Speaker 1: screaming socialist at me. Couldn't be further from the truth.
Speaker 1: I am very much a capitalist. Uh I believe in capitalism.
Speaker 1: I actually believe as an entrepreneur that that small business
Speaker 1: and big business can actually save uh culture can save
Speaker 1: this country uh In for many different reasons, UM, but
Speaker 1: I very much of the capitalist. I just believe that
Speaker 1: we have used the wrong economics and the wrong revenue
Speaker 1: system in restaurants and been benefiting the onlys. And I
Speaker 1: think that the I think that's time. That time has come,
Speaker 1: and I think smart and savvy operators have realized they
Speaker 1: can actually be more successful in uh In using more
Speaker 1: varieties of business models, keeping the cash register ringing, not
Speaker 1: just in lunch and dinner, uh using bonuses and incentives
Speaker 1: and and yes even co op models, and yes, even
Speaker 1: paying their employees more Uh. Michael Thestoria Um owns a
Speaker 1: a booming franchise, one of the one of the most
Speaker 1: popular pizza franchises in America and one of the fastest growing,
Speaker 1: by the way, called and Pizza. Uh. People can look
Speaker 1: him up Michael Historian his companies and Pizza. I think
Speaker 1: he's got forty locations around the northeastern United States something
Speaker 1: like that, and growing very quickly. Um. He's paying people
Speaker 1: what everyone else considers an exorbitant rate and is one
Speaker 1: of the most outspoken proponents of taking care of your
Speaker 1: own people first, which, by the way, is a Danny
Speaker 1: Meyer idea. Danny Meyer was the one thirty years ago
Speaker 1: who said the customer is not the most important person
Speaker 1: in the restaurant. The most important person in the restaurant
Speaker 1: are the employees. If you don't take care of your
Speaker 1: own people, then you have nothing to offer someone who
Speaker 1: walks in the door when you're open. And I believe
Speaker 1: those principles are very very important. Okay, Earlier you mentioned
Speaker 1: that given a choice, you'd like to hang with restaurant
Speaker 1: employees in those in recovery. What is special about those
Speaker 1: in the recovery? Is it just a shared experience, or
Speaker 1: do you learn something that those who have not been
Speaker 1: through the process don't have uh the latter um, And
Speaker 1: by the way, I should expand that, I was saying
Speaker 1: that with a with a smile and a wink. UM.
Speaker 1: I like hanging out with people who have been through
Speaker 1: some heavy ship. I like hanging out with people who
Speaker 1: have been forced to make some changes, have either had
Speaker 1: a phoenix like experience rising from the ashes, had the
Speaker 1: Joseph Campbell Hero's journey, and he was talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: the odisious of of ancient Greek mythology. Tested kept away
Speaker 1: from home for thirty years until finally returning to his
Speaker 1: beloved athens um and that was the way that he
Speaker 1: became spiritually fit and closer in understanding to what made
Speaker 1: him happy. UM. I believe that people who have uh
Speaker 1: not been tested in life, who have not faced uh
Speaker 1: at because I think we all do at some point
Speaker 1: incredible challenges UM, don't become the fullest versions of themselves.
Speaker 1: And I really love being I think food people are
Speaker 1: most generous people in the whole world. I mean one
Speaker 1: reason while our industry has been kneecapped for the last
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty months. I mean literally kneecapped. Who are what
Speaker 1: are we doing? We're just borrowing money from banks to
Speaker 1: feed first responders. I mean, you know, food people are
Speaker 1: still cooking for other people and we can't we can't
Speaker 1: help it. We This is how we believe in serving
Speaker 1: our communities. UM. And I believe people in recovery once
Speaker 1: they've established a a a firm handle on their own
Speaker 1: sobriety from whatever they're recovering from whatever there is um
Speaker 1: is UM. I think those people who are doing the
Speaker 1: real work to change themselves are some of the most
Speaker 1: inspirational people in the whole world. UM. I wish uh
Speaker 1: that uh someone who look like Santa Claus but without
Speaker 1: a hat, parted the clouds and whispered the the truth
Speaker 1: of life, the answer to all the questions that I
Speaker 1: have about you know, how to be happy, joyous and free.
Speaker 1: I wish that that that happened to me, but it
Speaker 1: never has. Where I've heard and learned from people is
Speaker 1: from folks who have been through the same challenges in
Speaker 1: life that I face or will face. UM, who share
Speaker 1: their experience, strength and hope with me. And when they
Speaker 1: do that, I believe that's actually my higher power talking
Speaker 1: to me. Without getting to out there. I hear the
Speaker 1: answers all the time from other human beings. That's who
Speaker 1: That's where I get my spiritual strength from. Uh. Is
Speaker 1: not from Santa Claus in the sky, but from other
Speaker 1: human beings. Okay, how does a nice Jewish boy from
Speaker 1: New York City like you who goes to you know,
Speaker 1: high level institutions like Dalton and end up in the
Speaker 1: food world? Oh? Boy, I knew when I was four
Speaker 1: years old. I think those other detours were I was
Speaker 1: very lucky that my parents had me in those places
Speaker 1: because I I received an education that allowed me to read, write,
Speaker 1: and think critically, um, and have some heightened level of
Speaker 1: intellectual curiosity and really be tested at school and enjoy
Speaker 1: it um and uh. But all along my parents were
Speaker 1: also traveling with me all around the world, cooking with me.
Speaker 1: My mother was an incredible cook, my father was an
Speaker 1: incredible cook. They both loved to travel. UH. We ate
Speaker 1: to travel and travel to eight. I've been around the
Speaker 1: world two or three times by the time I was
Speaker 1: fifteen years old. Um, what did you My dad was
Speaker 1: in the advertising business, and at one point his domestic
Speaker 1: agency decided they were going to go international and so
Speaker 1: they had to take a bunch of executives and actually
Speaker 1: be out on the road for years and years and
Speaker 1: years establishing these outside agencies. First by uh what's now
Speaker 1: called acquisition, right. You acquire an agency in London or France,
Speaker 1: or Rome or Paris or Rome, uh, and then you
Speaker 1: stock it with some people to establish your own culture.
Speaker 1: And then you send your c suite executives over there
Speaker 1: on a regular basis to be checking up on things.
Speaker 1: You know, there was you know, this is the sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies, by the way. Um. And so my father
Speaker 1: would you know, he'd have to go to Paris for
Speaker 1: three or four days because there was an issue over there.
Speaker 1: And if I was staying with him my parents were divorced,
Speaker 1: I would go. There was no nanny or babysitter. And
Speaker 1: my father believed that me going away with him was
Speaker 1: learning as much as I would anywhere else. Uh. The
Speaker 1: very progressive Dalton school that I was in h agreed.
Speaker 1: And so I would find myself at age nine sitting
Speaker 1: in a little seafood restaurant in LaSalle in Paris. The
Speaker 1: old the old fishing docks and and the just a
Speaker 1: place where there was danger, where there was you know old,
Speaker 1: you know, dirty music on the jukebox, where the lights
Speaker 1: were low, where there was a baseball bat and a
Speaker 1: gun behind the bar that had been used. But the
Speaker 1: food was incredible. And we're sitting there eating these tiny
Speaker 1: little big ornio, these steamed periwinkles, these little tiny blue
Speaker 1: snails because my father's counterpart, who ran the French agency,
Speaker 1: Jacques Lange, loved drinking pastie and eating uh, these big
Speaker 1: orno and then having a saute piece of fish for dinner.
Speaker 1: And my father loved it too. And I just sat
Speaker 1: there reading my book while they talked business, and it
Speaker 1: was it was life changing for me. I was hooked.
Speaker 1: I want it to be a part of that mystique
Speaker 1: and that that that or I loved everything about the
Speaker 1: food business. And then when I was the summer I
Speaker 1: turned fourteen, I asked my dad for that the spring
Speaker 1: before I turned four. You're the only you're the only
Speaker 1: kid or the other only child, only child, but my
Speaker 1: my father, I'm a July baby. So in you know,
Speaker 1: April of that year, I went to my dad and said, hey,
Speaker 1: summer's coming up. I kind of like an allowance raise,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think I was getting whatever seventy
Speaker 1: five cents. I'd like a buck And my dad looked
Speaker 1: at me and he said, what do you mean? And
Speaker 1: I said, you know, allow, it's a little a little
Speaker 1: something something for me. Now. My father, greatest generation, lied
Speaker 1: about his age, went into the Navy, you know, it
Speaker 1: was in the Pacific for three years, came back, helped
Speaker 1: build a big company. Um didn't take any crap from anybody.
Speaker 1: He was a legendary figure in the ad agency world
Speaker 1: of the fifties, sixties and seventies, and and you know,
Speaker 1: he was the He was one of those people who
Speaker 1: had gravitational pull around them. Everyone loved my father, UM,
Speaker 1: and you know that that everything slanted towards him when
Speaker 1: he walked into the room. I'm a pale version of
Speaker 1: my dad, much paler. And my father looked at me
Speaker 1: and laughed and told me to to get out of
Speaker 1: his room. I mean literally chase ma. And I was like,
Speaker 1: what what did I do? And the next day he explained,
Speaker 1: my dad loved to make me sleep on stuff. And
Speaker 1: the next day he explained to me that I was
Speaker 1: going to turn fourteen, allowance was over time to get
Speaker 1: a job. M That irked me for a while, but
Speaker 1: I immediately countered with great, I want to work at
Speaker 1: the Quiet Clam, which was a seafood restaurant that some
Speaker 1: family friends owned on the Montauk Highway in East Hampton.
Speaker 1: This is nineteen and uh, my father said, you can't
Speaker 1: work in a restaurant. How are you can't bike there?
Speaker 1: It's too far. I said, I'll get someone to drive me.
Speaker 1: I'll find I'll get a lift. He goes, well, Maggie
Speaker 1: and Irene haven't even offered you the job yet. I said,
Speaker 1: I'll go ask them. And thus became the process, a
Speaker 1: month long of negotiating with my parents to work at
Speaker 1: this seafood restaurant, which I did, and I had a
Speaker 1: natural ability for it. I cooked with my mother for
Speaker 1: you know, a decade. Um, I'd forged. We didn't call
Speaker 1: it foraging. Uh we we we gather food. We'd rake
Speaker 1: for clams at Barnes Landing. We'd surfcast for striped bass.
Speaker 1: We uh you know, go crabbing in the ponds beyond
Speaker 1: the Georgia Coad Breakwater. Um, we would go ealing in
Speaker 1: three mile Harbor. I mean, you know, my father loved
Speaker 1: to collect food and throw it on the grill at
Speaker 1: the beach or whatever. We pull muscles up from in
Speaker 1: between the rocks on the jetties. Uh. And my mother
Speaker 1: had a huge garden at our home, and so I'd
Speaker 1: been food for so I knew how to chop a tomato.
Speaker 1: I knew how to shock a clam. I knew how
Speaker 1: to grill a piece of meat. And I also had
Speaker 1: a natural aptitude for it. And so I became pretty
Speaker 1: successful throughout my high school years cooking at this restaurant.
Speaker 1: Went away to college because my father believed I needed
Speaker 1: to go to a good college, uh and studying art
Speaker 1: history and history. For a while, I thought I was
Speaker 1: going to teach art history. Um, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: similarities that art history has uh with with food. You know,
Speaker 1: you look at a painting. I remember Madam Karetsky in
Speaker 1: the in the first day of the first class of
Speaker 1: you know, Renaissance painting, put a put a painting by
Speaker 1: a Dutch master up on a wall from from the
Speaker 1: Northern Renaissance era. UM. And you know, it was a
Speaker 1: woman and she's standing in front of a window, and
Speaker 1: there's a table and a dog and a bowl of
Speaker 1: fruit on the you know, and that's really all you
Speaker 1: can see. And she asked everyone to write down everything
Speaker 1: you see in that painting. So everyone did. It wound
Speaker 1: up being, you know, fifteen twenty nuns. And then she
Speaker 1: spent the rest of the forty five minutes after calling
Speaker 1: on a few students, just to verify that no one
Speaker 1: could actually look at this painting the way she could.
Speaker 1: And she then spent forty five minutes explaining what she saw. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were pineapples. They don't grow in the fruit ball,
Speaker 1: they don't grow in holland that met the family was wealthy.
Speaker 1: Through the window you could see boats. That was probably there's.
Speaker 1: They were traders based on the dress, the material, the
Speaker 1: jewelry she had. And so she told this story of
Speaker 1: you know, of of you know coastal uh the coastal Netherlands, um,
Speaker 1: you know, in the fifteen hundreds in a way that
Speaker 1: was like Sherlock Holmes to me. I mean, how did
Speaker 1: she deduce this? I was staggered, and so I fell
Speaker 1: in love with our history. Had always studied history. I'm
Speaker 1: a double major, you know, got a essentially a degree
Speaker 1: in both. And I realized one day when I was
Speaker 1: staring at a bowl of china fina a jungle market
Speaker 1: in nicaraguach. I'm fine as a stew made of inners
Speaker 1: guts of the animals. It's you know, couching, a povera,
Speaker 1: the food of the poor, right, and it's it was
Speaker 1: made in big ten gallon barrels and all the workers
Speaker 1: and the people who finally got off work at ten
Speaker 1: o'clock at night after starting at seven in the morning.
Speaker 1: By the way, I would come by and for a
Speaker 1: few uh you know, shekels be able to have a
Speaker 1: big bowl of this incredibly nutritious food, but one made
Speaker 1: with parts that other people overlooked. And I looked at
Speaker 1: my bowl. It was probably the third or fourth season
Speaker 1: of Bizarre Foods and I and I just started talking
Speaker 1: about what this bowl of food looked like to me.
Speaker 1: And I didn't see, you know, intestines and livers and
Speaker 1: hearts and lungs um and onions and hot chilies, uh
Speaker 1: and and coconut milk. I saw, you know, families and
Speaker 1: the struggle to put food on the table and not
Speaker 1: being able to afford anything else, and raising animals and
Speaker 1: keeping the the innards to yourself when you had to
Speaker 1: harvest them and sell them, uh so that you could,
Speaker 1: you know, buy some school books for your kid. And
Speaker 1: I started to talk about Nicaraguan culture in you know,
Speaker 1: fourteen uh, the same way that Madam Koretsky talked about
Speaker 1: you know, Northern European culture in fifteen sixty eight, and
Speaker 1: I realized that it was the exact same thing. You
Speaker 1: have to look at something and get a snapshot of history.
Speaker 1: It's actually what drew me. And I'm not blowing smoke
Speaker 1: where I shouldn't. We've just met, but in full transparency,
Speaker 1: we have been emailing each other back and forth several
Speaker 1: times over the last couple of years. It's one of
Speaker 1: the things that I loved about your newsletters that I'm
Speaker 1: addicted to because you you do the same thing. You
Speaker 1: draw inferences and are able to illuminate parts of our
Speaker 1: contemporary culture or do comparative cultural studies to the way
Speaker 1: things may have been thirty or forty years ago to
Speaker 1: the way they are now in talking about music, and
Speaker 1: I feel that I do the same thing, uh in
Speaker 1: with food. Maybe I'm also a paler version of you,
Speaker 1: although I am an art history major too. Are you
Speaker 1: really absolutely, oh my gosh, fantastic, But making it about you,
Speaker 1: You're in college, you know, the next period of your life. Hey,
Speaker 1: are you working in restaurants? Be? Does that make it separate?
Speaker 1: You separate from the people? Advass or see you graduate?
Speaker 1: How do you get into the industry? And how do
Speaker 1: you fall off the edge with alcohol and drugs, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So that period, I was already a daily cocaine user
Speaker 1: and a a chipper, a weekend heroin user. By the
Speaker 1: time I graduated college high school in the nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: I mean pillows every day, smoking weed every day, doing
Speaker 1: coke every day. Weekends are for uh, we're for sniffing heroin.
Speaker 1: And I had fallen in love with hallucinogenic mushrooms and
Speaker 1: so two or three times a week I'm eating those.
Speaker 1: I'm a true New York City garbage head. Um. It
Speaker 1: was impossible to uh maintain the focus on my school work. Impossible. Um.
Speaker 1: After my first Tuesday after my freshman year in college,
Speaker 1: I was asked to take a mandatory semester off. UM.
Speaker 1: So the summer of nineteen eighty I went to Italy
Speaker 1: and I worked for nine months uh in a restaurant. Lie.
Speaker 1: I worked for four months in a restaurant in Venice
Speaker 1: during their peak time, UH called a La Columba restaurants
Speaker 1: that's still there, uh, right around the corner from the
Speaker 1: tavernas La Finch uh stone's throw from Saint Mark's Place.
Speaker 1: And I worked there for four or four and a
Speaker 1: half months, UM, and then I went to Paris and
Speaker 1: worked for at Last Center at a restaurant called Larca
Speaker 1: Strata uh, in the same building that now houses are
Speaker 1: Peg another very famous three star Michelin restaurant. A Larca
Speaker 1: Strata had three Michelin stars. At the time, there was
Speaker 1: no Italian How did you get these gigs? Well, those
Speaker 1: were the days. This is fascinating. I mean you talk
Speaker 1: about a time shift. Those were the days when if
Speaker 1: you were an American culinarian, uh, you could knock on
Speaker 1: the back door of a fancy restaurant and asked to
Speaker 1: work there, And if you were smart, you just said,
Speaker 1: I'll work for free, knowing that if you're good, they'll
Speaker 1: wind up paying you something. But at least they'll let
Speaker 1: you sleep on the banquets at night, or they have
Speaker 1: a place where people can sleep. I remember at one
Speaker 1: point at Alla Columba, I was sleeping in in literally
Speaker 1: an attic of a of a farm. There were cows
Speaker 1: living below me. And I was up in the attic.
Speaker 1: It was the best living. I slept like a baby
Speaker 1: every single night, probably because I was so exhausted. Uh
Speaker 1: But but then the chef would pick me up in
Speaker 1: the morning and we'd walk to the vegetable market and
Speaker 1: the rialto seafood market, and we pick up all the
Speaker 1: stuff for the restaurants. And I learned about ingredients because
Speaker 1: I was the guy carrying the chef's stuff and wheeling
Speaker 1: it on this two wheeler through the cobblestone streets of Venice,
Speaker 1: because I was the lowest guy in the totem pole.
Speaker 1: But as that uh well about to term nineteen year old, um,
Speaker 1: I was learning about ingredients I've never seen before in America. Right,
Speaker 1: I'd never seen a razor clams as thin as a pencil.
Speaker 1: I never knew to open them. You dip the end
Speaker 1: in a little pile of salt that you keep in
Speaker 1: a cup in your station, and they sort of open
Speaker 1: up for a second. You can run your finger through
Speaker 1: and not damage the raw razor clam, still keep them
Speaker 1: alive and remove them from the shell. I didn't know
Speaker 1: there were eight types of trevisa lettuce that we commonly
Speaker 1: call ridicio in this country. Um and that the tight
Speaker 1: head of ridicilo that we eat in this country was
Speaker 1: unknown to Italy. We actually genetically engineered it to the
Speaker 1: whole and tight use Americans like stuff where you get
Speaker 1: a lot of weight for your money, right, um. And
Speaker 1: so I learned all this stuff in this restaurant. Then
Speaker 1: I went to Paris to stand knocked on a door.
Speaker 1: So in those days, this is the late seventies, early eighties,
Speaker 1: you could actually do that. I was talking to Thomas Keller,
Speaker 1: one of the deans of American cooking and you know,
Speaker 1: arguably the most important chef of the last fifty years
Speaker 1: in America. Um and and again someone for whom he
Speaker 1: will still be in the books a hundred years from now. Um.
Speaker 1: And I asked him about stagiers and interns from cooking schools.
Speaker 1: I said, how many applications do you get a year
Speaker 1: two stage and intern in your restaurants? Because if you
Speaker 1: could work for three or four months in a Thomas
Speaker 1: Keller restaurant, it gets you a much better, more plumb
Speaker 1: position at the next place that you move on to
Speaker 1: and it and it gives you connections to some of
Speaker 1: the best culinarians in the world. And uh, he said, well,
Speaker 1: we stopped counting fifteen years ago when we hit ten
Speaker 1: thousand applications a year. So that just shows you how
Speaker 1: popular food is. I went to the Culinary Institute of
Speaker 1: America at one point because I thought I should go
Speaker 1: to cooking school. And I didn't have a great experience
Speaker 1: there on the on the day that I was I
Speaker 1: was there, Um, I already knew a lot, had been
Speaker 1: cooking a lot, and and the CIA was you know
Speaker 1: that there was no waiting list. I think now there's
Speaker 1: like a five year winning list to get into the
Speaker 1: c I A. I mean, it's just it's it's an incredible,
Speaker 1: incredible explosion in the food business in America on every
Speaker 1: single front. Um, when I was cooking and coming up,
Speaker 1: and I think it was a good thing, because I
Speaker 1: may have abandoned the thing I love more than anything
Speaker 1: in the whole world if it had been more difficult
Speaker 1: for me. Um, I was such a horrific drug addict
Speaker 1: and alcoholic. I somehow and by the way, alcoholism at
Speaker 1: the level that I was, uh suffering from the disease
Speaker 1: is oftentimes exemplified by you know, gross irresponsibility and gross
Speaker 1: responsibility at the same time, right, So I would show
Speaker 1: up for work and kick ass and make myself literally indispensable, right,
Speaker 1: I mean literally indispensable. Um. And then I would just
Speaker 1: disappear on a bender for three days, or steal a
Speaker 1: hundred dollars from the till, or take two bottles of vodka.
Speaker 1: And folks in the food business and the restaurants that
Speaker 1: I was working in, and by the way, some very
Speaker 1: good ones put up with this because I was the
Speaker 1: only guy that could put out two d orders of
Speaker 1: risotto on a Saturday night in three hours on only
Speaker 1: four burners. Um. I remember one restaurant I was in
Speaker 1: hearing a discussion between the general manager and the owner.
Speaker 1: The owner saying, you have to fire this guy, the
Speaker 1: general manager saying to him, who's gonna do two hundred
Speaker 1: egg dishes on Sunday brunch? We don't have anyone to
Speaker 1: do that. So I the general manager, saying, I don't
Speaker 1: care that he steals bucks worth of booze from every weekend.
Speaker 1: You know, is he an addict? Sure? Is he you know,
Speaker 1: a reprehensible mess? Sure? Is he an alcoholic? Absolutely? Is
Speaker 1: he a thief? For sure? But we know what he's
Speaker 1: doing and he can cook the gosh darn eggs um
Speaker 1: and eventually my food career. I cooked in some really
Speaker 1: great places and made quite a good name for myself
Speaker 1: in New York. Then the wheels came off and I
Speaker 1: became a homeless mess. I wound up trying to kill
Speaker 1: myself in a flop house hotel in January, uh, in
Speaker 1: New York City. Some friends found me, and a few
Speaker 1: days later I woke up and I was in a
Speaker 1: hospital attached to what is now Hazel and Betty Ford.
Speaker 1: You say you tried to kill yourself, A little bit slower.
Speaker 1: You were in such a bad place. Was his heroine?
Speaker 1: You're in the floor. Give me a little more detail,
Speaker 1: a little more fot I kicked. I kicked hard drugs
Speaker 1: three years before I went homeless. Um. In negotiation with
Speaker 1: my friends, my girlfriend, my parents, Oh, the problem is
Speaker 1: hard drugs. I'll get rid of those, right. The problem
Speaker 1: wasn't hard drugs. The problem was me. The problem was
Speaker 1: I couldn't handle taking anything that affected me from the
Speaker 1: neck up. Uh. But the drugs and alcohol are just
Speaker 1: a symptom. I I had a life problem. I had
Speaker 1: a responsibility problem. I had a spiritual illness. I was
Speaker 1: I was soul sick. I was I was incapable of
Speaker 1: living life on life's terms. I I I I didn't
Speaker 1: need to be rehabilitated. I needed to be hubilitated. I
Speaker 1: didn't have any of it. So um, little by little,
Speaker 1: I gave up everything, and then eventually I just got
Speaker 1: you know, I went from that phase. It's it's a
Speaker 1: very unique thing for alcoholics and drug addicts. You you
Speaker 1: you're in a phase where you tell people, when confronted
Speaker 1: with the truth, you know, by by people who love you, Hey,
Speaker 1: I love you, You're my best friend, You're you're you're
Speaker 1: a mess, and you've done X, Y and Z, and
Speaker 1: you got fired from your job, and your wife is
Speaker 1: leaving you, and the dog won't talk to you, and
Speaker 1: you you're you've got no money in the bank account.
Speaker 1: And the police said all this stuff is you have
Speaker 1: all these horrific things that have happened to you, your consequences,
Speaker 1: and you sit there and and you deny it. Oh, oh,
Speaker 1: well here's why, and that's not really the case. And
Speaker 1: well I wasn't really arrested. And she I really don't
Speaker 1: want to have that relationship with her, So I'm happy
Speaker 1: she's out of my life. And you just make every
Speaker 1: excuse in the book. And I went from that place
Speaker 1: about four years before I sobered up, to a place
Speaker 1: where if you confronted me with those things, I told
Speaker 1: you to go screw yourself and get out of my way.
Speaker 1: I didn't care. I didn't care that I was that way.
Speaker 1: And then eventually you get a case of what in
Speaker 1: recovery we call the buckets, where you're just like, you
Speaker 1: don't care. Fuck it. And at that point I did
Speaker 1: lower and lower and lower and lower, and crossed lines
Speaker 1: and barriers, uh that I never thought. I never thought
Speaker 1: I would I would cross. I never thought I would
Speaker 1: become a petty, petty criminal. That wasn't when when I
Speaker 1: was ten fifteen years old, that wasn't in my Hey, someday,
Speaker 1: I want to be so desperate that I'm gonna stand
Speaker 1: in the freezing cold outside of nightclubs in New York
Speaker 1: that I know, and when a drunk business guy in
Speaker 1: an expensive custom suit, because I could recognize one right
Speaker 1: go stumbling by. If he's not with any other friends,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna follow him, push him into the alley, grab
Speaker 1: his wallet, and run, or I'm gonna steal purses off
Speaker 1: the backs of restaurant chairs on a summer's day and
Speaker 1: Madison Avenue, run to the wall at Central Park, vaulted
Speaker 1: and head down to Alphabet City and sell the credit
Speaker 1: cards and passport and get some cash to to get
Speaker 1: high with. I never thought I was going to be
Speaker 1: that person. I never thought I would be the person
Speaker 1: whose parents would think they were dead. And I knew
Speaker 1: they thought that I was. It wasn't around, but didn't care.
Speaker 1: I'd rather just keep drinking and drugging endlessly. Wake up
Speaker 1: and use pass out, wake up and use pass out. UM.
Speaker 1: Eventually I got UH evicted from my There is a
Speaker 1: Sheriff of New York by the way. This was are
Speaker 1: a sheriff of Los Angeles, UM the UH. Shockingly, the
Speaker 1: Sheriff of New York UM knocked on my door one
Speaker 1: day with an eviction notice, and I wound up going
Speaker 1: down to the bar. I had no one to call
Speaker 1: for help. There was there was not a single human
Speaker 1: being whose number I could call. There was not a
Speaker 1: single human being who would take my call. UM. I
Speaker 1: had burned every bridge, and so I went down to
Speaker 1: the bar where I drank. This is by the way
Speaker 1: around the corner from the port authority a shot and
Speaker 1: beer bar that is the last stop on the on
Speaker 1: the subway for uh many people. Most of the regular
Speaker 1: customers in there just died of alcoholism, were wound up
Speaker 1: in institutions. And um, I would drink with these people
Speaker 1: till four or five in the morning. Then they closed
Speaker 1: the place for half an hour, spray it down, and
Speaker 1: then let you back in. And I went down there
Speaker 1: and this this old drunk named a J. I can
Speaker 1: see him. I've never forgotten what he looked like that night.
Speaker 1: He didn't have all his teeth, he had a big beard, glasses.
Speaker 1: He was the loudmouth guy, but he was kind of
Speaker 1: like the ringleader, was the cock of the walk in
Speaker 1: that bar. And he's like, what's up? And I was
Speaker 1: just like God evicted. And he said, sleep with us tonight.
Speaker 1: And I said, where are you sleeping? He goes, we
Speaker 1: have an abandoned building down on Sullivan Street that were squatting,
Speaker 1: and uh, I said, okay, I had a by the
Speaker 1: way that I had a duffel bag of dirty clothes
Speaker 1: with me, and so I spent eleven months of my
Speaker 1: life sleeping on that pile of dirty clothes in an
Speaker 1: abandoned building on Sullivan Street. Uh, cement casements in the windows. Um.
Speaker 1: It was when I look back on it, it was awful,
Speaker 1: and to me it was completely okay at the time.
Speaker 1: I used to steal a bottle of comic cleanser, uh
Speaker 1: every couple of days at the bodega down the street. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, put some comic cleanser in your jacket pocket
Speaker 1: by a pack of smokes kind of thing, and then
Speaker 1: sprinkle a circle of comic cleanser around, uh my pile
Speaker 1: of dirty clothes so the rats and roaches wouldn't crawl
Speaker 1: over me when I passed out. Um. And eventually one
Speaker 1: day I woke up there and I just realized there's
Speaker 1: winners and losers in this world. Will Actually, right after
Speaker 1: New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, I woke up
Speaker 1: there and I just thought, I've I'm irredeemable and I'm hopeless.
Speaker 1: This is I literally should just end it all. I
Speaker 1: was in so much pain getting up every morning that
Speaker 1: hitting the bottle even you know, chugging at it, and
Speaker 1: you know, you know, like I said, I kicked the
Speaker 1: hard drugs, but I was still drinking booze and smoking
Speaker 1: with and drinking. By the way, a lot, a lot
Speaker 1: large volumes of alcohol. I was very turned out. It
Speaker 1: was very sick. I found out when I got to
Speaker 1: the hospital unit at Hazelden I needed to be there
Speaker 1: for four or five days and said the usual one
Speaker 1: or two because they were very concerned about my body
Speaker 1: giving out, UM, my organs, my my liver and kidney's
Speaker 1: most importantly. UH. And I just decided that I was
Speaker 1: I was gonna end it all. And I stole some
Speaker 1: jewelry from my godmother and I went in and I
Speaker 1: hocked it in New Jersey. By the way, huge mistake.
Speaker 1: Never steal something in one town, cross the state lines
Speaker 1: and hocket another and leave a paper trail with your
Speaker 1: name on it. UH. That's very typical alcoholic behavior. I
Speaker 1: wound up facing that charge when I was two years
Speaker 1: sober in Minnesota, UH, and pled guilty to it because
Speaker 1: I did it, and recovery had taught me to answer
Speaker 1: for the stuff that I did, and I was facing
Speaker 1: a couple of years in the workhouse at at best,
Speaker 1: and I wound up getting an action in contemplation of
Speaker 1: dismissal because of the service work that I had done.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the loving community here in Minnesota, that got me. Well, um,
Speaker 1: but when when I went to kill myself and I well,
Speaker 1: I took this money that I from the jewelry at Hawks,
Speaker 1: and I went to the San Pedro Hotel and I
Speaker 1: just bought a ton of vodka and just went into
Speaker 1: this hotel and just started chugging booze around the clock,
Speaker 1: knowing I just knew in my gut my body's gonna
Speaker 1: gonna quit. I was very, very sick, and I drank around.
Speaker 1: I know I was there for at least three days,
Speaker 1: but no more than five. Uh and uh based on
Speaker 1: you know, the information my friends had about that they
Speaker 1: got from the hotel person about when I got in
Speaker 1: and when they came around me. And uh, two days later,
Speaker 1: I was on the plane one way ticket to Minnesota. Okay,
Speaker 1: a couple of things. One, you know, just like the
Speaker 1: TV show Intervention, someone can need to go to rehab,
Speaker 1: but they either don't want to or they go and
Speaker 1: they jump. So, okay, what's your thought process? And then
Speaker 1: you get out your Minnesota, how do you get back
Speaker 1: into the food world? Super super easy, I mean easy
Speaker 1: answer to both, but I guess I'm really talking beyond that.
Speaker 1: You end up building let me let me get to
Speaker 1: my question a little more specifically, you end up building
Speaker 1: this empire. Most people, when asked that question, they say, well,
Speaker 1: it just happened. Okay, I'm sophisticated enough to know it
Speaker 1: never just tapped. It was very intentional on very so
Speaker 1: walk me through accepting rehabilitation and then deciding that you
Speaker 1: wanted to be more than just a chef and a restaurant. Um.
Speaker 1: Really very simple story. Um. It was not my first
Speaker 1: go round at recovery. The difference was that that particular
Speaker 1: uh time, I would have sobered up in a liquor store.
Speaker 1: I was sick and tired of being sick and tired,
Speaker 1: and I had just this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little
Speaker 1: light that came under my door, and I just focused
Speaker 1: on that little tiny light. And I had a series
Speaker 1: of experiences my first thirty days in recovery sufficient to
Speaker 1: get me to point C, D and E. I went
Speaker 1: to a half I had a good experience in my
Speaker 1: primary treatment at Hazel, and I went to I. I
Speaker 1: just said yes to everything I was told to do.
Speaker 1: I got a sponsor, I went to meetings, I went
Speaker 1: lived in the halfway house first seven months. Uh, they
Speaker 1: told me get a job. I got a job washing
Speaker 1: toilets uh in the the workhouse and jail system in St.
Speaker 1: Downtown St. Paul. That was so horrific a job. I
Speaker 1: got another job two days later as a dishwasher in
Speaker 1: a coffee shop. Now a coffee shop here in Minnesota
Speaker 1: kind of like once in New York. Uh is a
Speaker 1: place not like a Starbucks, but a place that opens
Speaker 1: at six am and serves breakfast and lunch all day long.
Speaker 1: And they have lots of hot coffee and just sit
Speaker 1: on stools and UH. Sometimes that the employees who worked
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, there were two of them, wouldn't show up.
Speaker 1: I showed up every day, uh for that job. It
Speaker 1: was the best job I ever had. I never wanted
Speaker 1: a job so much in my life is that job.
Speaker 1: And I treated it like like gold. And uh when
Speaker 1: they were sick, I would cook or or they wouldn't
Speaker 1: show and I would cook and the owners were like, Wow,
Speaker 1: you're sandwich is looking really good today. In the soup
Speaker 1: seems really good. And uh so I got, you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit of a raise and some preferential hours.
Speaker 1: But I was just very anonymous and going back to
Speaker 1: my halfway house every night. And eventually I decided to
Speaker 1: become a dishwasher at a better restaurant, and my plan
Speaker 1: was to still to go back to New York when
Speaker 1: I got out of the halfway house, and so I
Speaker 1: went to this uh, French restaurant in that had just opened.
Speaker 1: It was like two days old. And I knew that
Speaker 1: the restaurant was owned by two French guys in New
Speaker 1: York that I knew from partying days in sag Harbord.
Speaker 1: They owned a restaurant in New York of the same name,
Speaker 1: Cafe and de Ti in the Theater District. And they
Speaker 1: had opened a Cafe and de Ti in the Fauchet
Speaker 1: Tower right around the corner from the Theater District here
Speaker 1: in the Twin Cities. Um and uh, you know, so
Speaker 1: I knew that it would be a good place to work,
Speaker 1: and so I went there and I got a job
Speaker 1: as a dishwasher. And one day one of the cooks
Speaker 1: didn't show up for work, and um, it was really
Speaker 1: pretty straightforward. I went up to the owner and the
Speaker 1: chef and I said, look, I can put out that
Speaker 1: guy's station. And it was the grill station onion, soup,
Speaker 1: steak free. It's you know, a couple of appetizers, scargo
Speaker 1: went under the broiler there. It was a very very
Speaker 1: simple station. It did a couple of specials that day,
Speaker 1: and the lunch menu a chicken pie ard, a couple
Speaker 1: other things. Um, but you know it's ten twelve items
Speaker 1: on the menu came off of that station. It was
Speaker 1: the easiest station I thought in the restaurant um. And
Speaker 1: I've been watching for a couple of weeks. You know,
Speaker 1: as the dishwasher, you're running down and grabbing bus tubs
Speaker 1: of pots and pants from underneath the counters where the
Speaker 1: chefs are cooking. The cooks are cooking, and you know,
Speaker 1: my perch in the dish room, I could see what
Speaker 1: all the people were doing. And frequently, when there's no
Speaker 1: more dishes to watch your peeling potatoes, are working on
Speaker 1: prep for the chef. And so you know, I'm just
Speaker 1: oiling an anonymity. They're very blissfully by the way. This
Speaker 1: guy gets sick. They don't have a choice. They have
Speaker 1: to let me cook. And they're like, well, the dish washer, okay,
Speaker 1: keep an eye in and we'll take a couple of
Speaker 1: dishes away from you so it's easier. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: can do it. I can do it. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: do you know how to grill the salmon. It's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to I know how to grill
Speaker 1: the salmon. Um. And after the lunch shift ended, the
Speaker 1: owner of the restaurant, I remember, opened the door to
Speaker 1: his office and as I was walking by, and I
Speaker 1: remember just seeing his finger and I walked in the
Speaker 1: office and he he sat me down and he said,
Speaker 1: can you answer me one? I have one question for you?
Speaker 1: And I said sure. He said, can you explain to
Speaker 1: me why my dishwasher just put out food better than
Speaker 1: the chef in my restaurant does? And why when everything
Speaker 1: went to ship on the line in the middle of
Speaker 1: lunch because they were packed. I mean they were just
Speaker 1: murdered with business, um, and with lunch, you're just slammed
Speaker 1: all at once. They were doing a full second turn,
Speaker 1: which is how popular it was. But great, there was
Speaker 1: no French bistro in that town. Every rest every city
Speaker 1: needs a French bistro in a big seat like Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: right in downtown. It was quite famous. Um. And I said,
Speaker 1: I've worked in restaurants all my life and I'm just
Speaker 1: here in Minnesota for a while. And the guy said,
Speaker 1: why And I told him and he said, well, he says, I,
Speaker 1: I'll make you the chef in this restaurant. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: first of all, you're you're offering that to me immediately
Speaker 1: shows me that you don't know what you're doing. I said,
Speaker 1: so I'm less inclined to take that job. But I
Speaker 1: also can't take that job because I'm living in a
Speaker 1: halfway house. I have to go home and I have
Speaker 1: to be there every night at five o'clock, right And uh,
Speaker 1: I said, but I love my my job dishwashing here
Speaker 1: and I'd like to keep it. And he said, uh, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk to the chef. We're gonna have you
Speaker 1: prepping and do it. So I was washing dishes, I
Speaker 1: was waiting some tables, I was prepping and uh. I
Speaker 1: worked there for four months and then I got out
Speaker 1: of the halfway house and I needed to earn money
Speaker 1: to put a roof over my head. And I went
Speaker 1: back to him and I said, is that job offer
Speaker 1: still available? And he said yes, and I said, great,
Speaker 1: I'll take it. And he said, do you want to
Speaker 1: negotiate salary? I said not at all. I said, you
Speaker 1: pay me whatever you think is fair. He said, you're
Speaker 1: kidding me, and I said no. I said, you're gonna
Speaker 1: pay me more three months from now and six months
Speaker 1: from more, but you start me whatever you want, because
Speaker 1: remember I'm going from dishwasher at six dollars an hour
Speaker 1: whatever it was back then, to like the highest salary
Speaker 1: position in the restaurant. Um. But I also knew that
Speaker 1: I could change that restaurant and make it great, uh,
Speaker 1: and that the current team there was was not capable
Speaker 1: of that. And I told him I just need these
Speaker 1: These are the three nights off that I can't work
Speaker 1: because I need to go to my meetings. I want
Speaker 1: permission to have a daytime meeting from noon, sorry, from
Speaker 1: two to three o'clock, three days a week in the
Speaker 1: back of the dining room. He said sure, And I
Speaker 1: negotiated some other stuff all around my recovery, stuff that
Speaker 1: my my sponsor in the twelve step program that I
Speaker 1: was attending, had insisted on, by the way, and uh.
Speaker 1: And that was it. And after five or six years
Speaker 1: of you know, that restaurant, we within a year I
Speaker 1: replaced everyone and was arguably I mean not my words,
Speaker 1: wasn't are the magazines and newspapers you know called it
Speaker 1: the best restaurant in town. It was. Uh. We did
Speaker 1: so well it allowed the managing partner in Minneapolis to
Speaker 1: buy the place back after I've been there a year,
Speaker 1: from the French partners in New York who didn't want
Speaker 1: to run it or own a restaurant in Minneapolis anyway.
Speaker 1: UM and so I felt very good about what we
Speaker 1: achieved there. And then I decided. I had a moment
Speaker 1: of clarity about five six years in. I realized I
Speaker 1: was telling stories with my food and telling stories to
Speaker 1: my staff, but I felt my stories needed a bigger audience.
Speaker 1: And I wasn't going to be the best version of
Speaker 1: myself if I stayed cooking in a restaurant as much
Speaker 1: as I love them. And this is ninete eight nine nine, UM,
Speaker 1: and I left. I resigned, and I got a job,
Speaker 1: an internship, unpaid at a radio station, a magazine, the
Speaker 1: Big Glossy Monthly Minneapolis State Paul Magazine, Radio State, big
Speaker 1: radio station in town doing a weekend radio show for
Speaker 1: an hour on food. And a TV station, a local Uh.
Speaker 1: It was a up N station after it was Channel nine.
Speaker 1: It was an independence In those days in the Midwest,
Speaker 1: there was still radio independent TV stations owned by single people.
Speaker 1: Like a person owned this station and programmed it with
Speaker 1: stuff from all the other stuff that just doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: And I don't think there's a TV station like that
Speaker 1: left in America. But Stu Swartz owned this, this station
Speaker 1: that him a up N station, then a Fox O
Speaker 1: and O, UM and I started doing their morning. I
Speaker 1: was a food feature reporter and once the week I
Speaker 1: would do a little food recipe thing. And after ninety
Speaker 1: days of working for free for all of them, I just,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's my it's no secret. Get a job
Speaker 1: for free, make yourself indispensable, the wind up paying you.
Speaker 1: UM and I just I very much had a one,
Speaker 1: five and ten year plan, and I just put you know,
Speaker 1: my dream wasn't a dream, it was a goal because
Speaker 1: I had actual steps leading up to what it would
Speaker 1: take to achieve my goal. I wanted to have a
Speaker 1: TV show that broadcast internationally talking about food and culture
Speaker 1: as a unifying element in a world that I felt
Speaker 1: we were only talking about the things that divided us.
Speaker 1: And I I, if you try to sell that show,
Speaker 1: no one's go to Bube. So I knew I had
Speaker 1: to invent a hook. So I sort of sold a
Speaker 1: Trojan Horse UM and I the hook that I created was,
Speaker 1: you know, fat white guy goes around the world, eats
Speaker 1: bugs and sort of exaggerating, but you you get where
Speaker 1: I'm going with this. And the network said, okay, great, okay,
Speaker 1: but a little bit slower. Which network? And this was
Speaker 1: literally your first pitch other than Stu Schwartz station. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it wasn't my first, UM, but it kind of
Speaker 1: was my It was my only. Uh I, So I'm working.
Speaker 1: My goal was to be good enough at the TV station,
Speaker 1: the radio station, the magazine to put together a deck
Speaker 1: on myself. And with the TV work, I could put
Speaker 1: together a real and if I was doing food feature
Speaker 1: reporting and interviewing, and I was like, you know, Al
Speaker 1: Franken was had returned to Minnesota, was doing a radio
Speaker 1: show and writing these books. So his very first book
Speaker 1: came out and he came on and cooked with me.
Speaker 1: So I snipped that clip out and I went out
Speaker 1: to this farm and did a package. You know, because
Speaker 1: I learned, I created my own syllabus. I wanted to
Speaker 1: learn how to be in front of a camera, edit
Speaker 1: with a cameraman. I needed to know about cameras and
Speaker 1: lighting and I just had to learn the basic stuff
Speaker 1: of the business. And the only way to do that
Speaker 1: is do it in live local news. There's no other
Speaker 1: place to do it, right. And then I had enough
Speaker 1: stuff and I started trying to take meetings, um, but
Speaker 1: no one would meet with me. I was just a
Speaker 1: guy with an idea, right. Uh. But eventually I weaseled
Speaker 1: my way into enough doors and uh that I got
Speaker 1: the attention of some people here in town who were
Speaker 1: producing shows for h G TV local production companies, and
Speaker 1: so I became the in house chef. I was doing
Speaker 1: episodes a year on Typical Mary Ellen, which was an
Speaker 1: HDTV home tips show early days of h G and
Speaker 1: on a syndicated program called Rebecca's Garden. And so then
Speaker 1: I had clips of myself on nationally syndicated TV shows,
Speaker 1: and so that I took that and sent it around
Speaker 1: and eventually it caught the eye of a first year employee,
Speaker 1: the lowest person on the totem pole at Food Network,
Speaker 1: by the name of Alison Page. Alison Page wound up
Speaker 1: running Food Network twenty years later and is now the
Speaker 1: runs Magnolia Network, the partnership between Chip and Joanna Gaines
Speaker 1: and Discovery, and she is one of the smartest and
Speaker 1: best human beings in the TV business. Um, and I
Speaker 1: got to meet with her and uh, she said, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I can help. I know, I'm literally
Speaker 1: the person here was the least amount of juice. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell them that you're great and you've got
Speaker 1: great tape. She did. She actually told them to try
Speaker 1: to do something with me, and it of course they
Speaker 1: said no, uh, but she did tell me. Uh, she
Speaker 1: gave me one great piece of advice. She said, look,
Speaker 1: if you come on Food Network, you're gonna be on
Speaker 1: Saturday mornings and there's gonna be there's twenty other shows
Speaker 1: being tried out then. And I said, well, my show's
Speaker 1: difference about Traveling is that she goes, yeah, why don't
Speaker 1: you talk to Travel Channel. Travel Channel is just hired
Speaker 1: a new president and they're trying to change and it
Speaker 1: really sort of hasn't been put out there a lot,
Speaker 1: but they're they're they're going away from unhosted programs and
Speaker 1: they're gonna start doing hosted shows. And that was radical
Speaker 1: Travel Channel at that time. This is about two years
Speaker 1: three years before uh, the first episode of Bizarre Foods.
Speaker 1: There was just like World's Best bathrooms, world sexiest beaches,
Speaker 1: world's you know, biggest houses, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: all unhosted. Um. So I started knocking on the because
Speaker 1: I'd rather be one of my business gurus taught me
Speaker 1: a long time ago, better to be the only than
Speaker 1: be the best. So I decided that I wanted to
Speaker 1: be the only food guy on Travel Channel. I wound
Speaker 1: up being one year late by the time they bought
Speaker 1: the show, but it wound up being good for me
Speaker 1: because that other person was Anthony Bourdain. Um. But I
Speaker 1: went and I just all I do is I focused
Speaker 1: on Travel Channel. But at this point I'm a I'm
Speaker 1: known to people in the business because I'm on two
Speaker 1: nationally syndicated shows and sort of like I'm only doing
Speaker 1: five minutes an hour on someone else's show, but I'm
Speaker 1: a regular, right. So I finally got someone to meet
Speaker 1: with me a Travel Channel. I made a tape on
Speaker 1: my own. They didn't look at it for six or
Speaker 1: nine months. Meanwhile, they hire Samantha Brown to host a show.
Speaker 1: They buy Tony Show a Cooks Tour, put it on
Speaker 1: for a year, and then wind up doing uh no
Speaker 1: reservations with him, uh and uh one day uh. The
Speaker 1: the head of the network, uh, finds my disc in
Speaker 1: his briefcase. This is a true story, and he hadn't
Speaker 1: watched it, and he'd run out of content and others
Speaker 1: up to do when he was stuck in an airport
Speaker 1: and he slid it into his computer in the days
Speaker 1: when for those who are younger, discs actually could go
Speaker 1: into your computer in the side. There's a little port
Speaker 1: that opened up, and he watched it, and he really
Speaker 1: liked me and the show. And I got an invitation
Speaker 1: to go to Discovery headquarters in Bethesda, Uh, Maryland and
Speaker 1: pitch my idea to the head of the network, Pat
Speaker 1: Young and about ten other people in the room. Okay,
Speaker 1: just as an intermediary point, why Bizarre Foods. I didn't
Speaker 1: name it. I had a worse name for it. It
Speaker 1: would have died if I had been allowed to name
Speaker 1: the show. But the wee relevant of the moniker. Well
Speaker 1: what here here, here's what Here's what I came up with.
Speaker 1: I walked in that room and I told him, I said,
Speaker 1: you know, here's you know, the Wandering Spoon or whatever
Speaker 1: horrible show that I had. I'm going to go into
Speaker 1: countries and cultures and I'm going to tell stories through
Speaker 1: food about their culture to illuminate our commonalities and not
Speaker 1: dwell in our differences. I'm going to show viewers that
Speaker 1: through fun and entertaining food series, uh, we can learn
Speaker 1: to practice better patients, tolerance, and understanding with each other.
Speaker 1: Because at the end of the day, sitting down to
Speaker 1: a meal with a family in Chicago is identical to
Speaker 1: sitting down with tribal people in the middle of the
Speaker 1: African veld Um. It's just that what's being served at
Speaker 1: the table is different. And here's my point of difference.
Speaker 1: I'm not telling stories about chicken breasts or you know,
Speaker 1: fetucchini alfredo or you know, pork wantons. We're gonna be
Speaker 1: eating you know, grilled African word hog and scorpions and
Speaker 1: in but in the countries where they actually eat those things,
Speaker 1: question why why this fantastical, crazy food that sounds nuts
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, everyone loves to eat. So if
Speaker 1: we can accept that this is what's part of the
Speaker 1: regular diet in another part of the world. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: one man's weird as another man's wonderful, then maybe we'll
Speaker 1: have some empathy and some level of understanding for a culture.
Speaker 1: I said, Americans inhale other cultures first and foremost through
Speaker 1: their mouths. Then we learned to love their music and
Speaker 1: their people and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: But we love other cultures food first and foremost and uh.
Speaker 1: The next day, I got a call from the network
Speaker 1: and they said, if in its current format, we're gonna pass.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, what do you mean is his
Speaker 1: current format? And Pat Young said to me, it's entertainment educational.
Speaker 1: He says, but if you can figure out a way
Speaker 1: to come pitch it to me again where it's seventy entertainment, uh, education,
Speaker 1: I'll help you find a production company and I'll put
Speaker 1: this show on in a hundred and seventy five countries.
Speaker 1: He says, I think you're gonna be a big star.
Speaker 1: And I I went back to the drawing board and
Speaker 1: I kind of repositioned the whole thing and created six
Speaker 1: acts that were all different in this show. And he
Speaker 1: ended up giving me a list of approved production companies,
Speaker 1: some of whom were in Minnesota. I went to because
Speaker 1: I had never delivered a show before, so I went
Speaker 1: to this production company. They were thrilled to get a
Speaker 1: show that was essentially sold um. And when we went
Speaker 1: to shoot the pilot. They were still airing Cooks Tour
Speaker 1: reruns of Cooks Tour, Tony's first show. By the time
Speaker 1: my show delivered, he'd had a season on Travel Channel. UM,
Speaker 1: they put Pat Wanted Immersive Talent, and you know, it
Speaker 1: was just uh, Samantha Brown, Tony then me. He put
Speaker 1: Tony and I on Monday nights back to back, UM,
Speaker 1: and the ratings just exploded, and it was you know,
Speaker 1: the following year, I got my own night Tuesday, and
Speaker 1: they built shows around me. UM. I got very lucky.
Speaker 1: The show's you know, everything is ratings, as you know.
Speaker 1: So the premier comes out, we do okay. Second week,
Speaker 1: we go up a couple of tents of a point.
Speaker 1: Third week, third week we come out and we come
Speaker 1: out of the gate and we're a couple of tents
Speaker 1: below and I'm ready for them to cancel the show,
Speaker 1: fully ready for them to cancel the show. But it
Speaker 1: was the episode when we were in uh Ecuador and
Speaker 1: a shaman, the witch doctor, who is not supposed to
Speaker 1: be in the show. I had to beg the producer
Speaker 1: of the photographer to come into this witch doctor's residence
Speaker 1: with me to get an exorcism performed on my body
Speaker 1: and he spat up on me and he I mean,
Speaker 1: anyone can google this. It's it pops up right away
Speaker 1: and resimmering witch doctor Ecuador, and he spits on me.
Speaker 1: He lights me on fire. I'm naked by the way
Speaker 1: in his us he kills two guinea pigs by beating
Speaker 1: him on my chest. He throws all this stuff. He
Speaker 1: break out in hives because he beats me with this
Speaker 1: giant bunch of herbs and he Uh, I walk out
Speaker 1: of there and uh, I'd like to say something funny
Speaker 1: the camera. Well, I feel better, And it was a
Speaker 1: very very very very funny sort of moment in the
Speaker 1: history of the show. Um. Now, when it aired, the
Speaker 1: ratings the next day were not as good, and I'm
Speaker 1: ready for the thing to be canceled. But you can't
Speaker 1: remember I'm on Monday nights, right, So the next day
Speaker 1: was Tuesday, we get the ratings. Wednesday morning, I get
Speaker 1: a call from the booker at the tonight show. Uh,
Speaker 1: we've we saw this scene and we showed it to
Speaker 1: Jay and Jay would like you to be on the
Speaker 1: show Friday night. And I literally I said, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, Michael stopped I thought it was my friend
Speaker 1: pulling my leg and I flew out Thursday night. Friday night,
Speaker 1: I was on the Tonight Show. UH and Jay we
Speaker 1: we had a great time and Jay said, You've got
Speaker 1: to come back. We love having you. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: next week the ratings quadrupled. Quinn tuppled because those were
Speaker 1: the days when your very first question that you asked me,
Speaker 1: what do you what? Where do you need to be
Speaker 1: to spread your message? In those days, the Tonight Show
Speaker 1: was the most watched thing other than the Super Bowl
Speaker 1: and Saturday Night Live, Right, And um, I wound up
Speaker 1: doing the Tonight Show four or five times over the
Speaker 1: next two or three years. And UM, I think without
Speaker 1: that invitation from j the show, who knows who would
Speaker 1: have happened. It could have found an audience or not.
Speaker 1: But all I know is thanks to that that witch
Speaker 1: doctor in Ecuador, I had a great year after that exorcism.
Speaker 1: I mean it was good. Uh. And the moral of
Speaker 1: the story is, anytime you can have an exorcism in
Speaker 1: Oda Vallo, Ecuador, in the Central Highlands, do it the
Speaker 1: brew harrows. They're the mail which is have incredible power. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was successful. But I also to your point,
Speaker 1: had a desire to start multiple businesses and do multiple
Speaker 1: things with the gifts that I had been given. UM.
Speaker 1: I have a marketing company of a production company that's
Speaker 1: now eight years old that makes TV for me and
Speaker 1: lots of other people, that's successful hospitality company, and I've
Speaker 1: you know, I've written books, and I've written for magazines,
Speaker 1: and I've done all the things that you're supposed to
Speaker 1: do in in my career, mostly because it's stuff that
Speaker 1: I want to do that has fun, but it also
Speaker 1: has to have a service element to it. We we
Speaker 1: believe very seriously at our companies that everything has to
Speaker 1: leave the world a better place, otherwise we're not going
Speaker 1: to do it. That that feeling has become stronger over
Speaker 1: the last ten years than it was the first ten
Speaker 1: years when we started um Our Companies. Uh, my first
Speaker 1: company is still alive part of this triad of groups
Speaker 1: and we're nineteen years old. UM it's a very very
Speaker 1: powerful statement. I think about what can happen when you
Speaker 1: treat human beings with dignity and respect. UM. I I
Speaker 1: was an unredeemable user of people and taker of things
Speaker 1: when I arrived in Minnesota January and the community here,
Speaker 1: loved me up and gave me, uh a little bit
Speaker 1: of respect and a little bit of dignity even when
Speaker 1: I didn't deserve it, and they watered me like a plant.
Speaker 1: And I think this is why human beings need to
Speaker 1: be treated better in this country, because there's a million
Speaker 1: versions of me out there that they're they're sleeping on corners,
Speaker 1: they're in homeless shelters, they're in public hospitals, they're in
Speaker 1: jails and institutions, and we need to take better care
Speaker 1: of them because our society would be better off if
Speaker 1: we actually love them up and gave them the dignity
Speaker 1: and respect they needed to get well. Uh Um. It's
Speaker 1: why I'm proud is when people say what's the what's
Speaker 1: the most important thing you do? It's like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: on the board of a group of New York called
Speaker 1: Services for the Underserved, where we're able to take care
Speaker 1: of thirty five thousand New Yorkers that no other agency
Speaker 1: will take care of. Those are the things that that
Speaker 1: I'm proud of. St of I. I love having an
Speaker 1: Emmy on the mantel in the house. I love having,
Speaker 1: you know, all the James Beard Awards and all the
Speaker 1: other stuff that I have, and you know, I turn
Speaker 1: on the TV and there I am and a bunch
Speaker 1: of different streamers or Magnolia or whatever. That's great, but
Speaker 1: it pales in comparison to all the other stuff that
Speaker 1: I do, because that's the stuff that makes me feel
Speaker 1: like I'm actually of this world and not taking from
Speaker 1: this world. Okay, I only have a few minutes left,
Speaker 1: so let's do lightning round quick answers. What's your goal now?
Speaker 1: Change more public policy and laws in America to make
Speaker 1: it easier for people uh to get fed, take themselves
Speaker 1: out of the hunger category that they're in, and help
Speaker 1: to remake our food system in America. It's a small goal.
Speaker 1: You're divorced. And to what degree did your lifestyle terms
Speaker 1: to travel around the world contribute to that? And can
Speaker 1: people in this world, in the food world, certainly in
Speaker 1: the food travel world, can they maintain a healthy relationship? No,
Speaker 1: I think you need to. I think you need to
Speaker 1: change things in your life. If you want your relationships
Speaker 1: to prosper, you need to invest in them and you
Speaker 1: need to do the work. Um, you can't be I
Speaker 1: mean nowadays we can play words with friends, so you
Speaker 1: know you can you play scrabble from anywhere in the world. Sure,
Speaker 1: sure you can, there's an app for that. Uh, all
Speaker 1: the face times in the world can't help you with
Speaker 1: your primary relationships. You have to put the work in.
Speaker 1: Where have you not been that you want to go
Speaker 1: to Czechoslovakia? And why? Why? Is so ready an answer?
Speaker 1: And why have you not been? And why do you
Speaker 1: want to go? I've been to a hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: seven countries, and I'm not talking about passing through. I
Speaker 1: mean actually been, uh, spend time there. I've been to
Speaker 1: China eighteen times. I've never been there for less than
Speaker 1: two weeks. I've never seen the Great Wall. And the
Speaker 1: reason is that I go in and I and I
Speaker 1: haven't experienced there that no one else gets to have.
Speaker 1: You know, I go to Botswana. I saw one square
Speaker 1: mile of that country because I lived with the Juntoasi,
Speaker 1: a protected tribe, the tribe from the movie The Gods
Speaker 1: must be Crazy. No one has been allowed to live
Speaker 1: with them for a week in forty years except me. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you know there's I nothing can come to
Speaker 1: measure that. But I'd love to go back to Box
Speaker 1: want and see the rest of this amazing country. I'd
Speaker 1: love to go to China's a tourist and actually see
Speaker 1: some of the sights and sounds and smells that I
Speaker 1: never saw. Um. I'd like to go back to some
Speaker 1: of the countries I've only been to once that were
Speaker 1: really awesome. I actually I've been to Croatia twice. I
Speaker 1: wish I could go to Croatia every year. It's an
Speaker 1: incredible country with amazing people. Um, killer food, beautiful, But
Speaker 1: never been there, just just scheduling and a couple of
Speaker 1: times that it was on the docket to go shoot there,
Speaker 1: some other talent was going there and they decided we
Speaker 1: want zimmer and somewhere else. And you know, you don't
Speaker 1: get everything you want, even if you're successful in this industry,
Speaker 1: so a lot of times I had to take a
Speaker 1: back seat to somebody else. Um. And just this is
Speaker 1: crazy that I've been to a hundred seventy seven countries
Speaker 1: and and someone like me has never been to Prague
Speaker 1: or any of Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: so a lot of people want to travel where ultimately
Speaker 1: it's somewhat familiar. They go to the UK, they speak English.
Speaker 1: My experiences I've had the best times in places like
Speaker 1: bo Guitar and Mumbai. Well, mum by the speaking to
Speaker 1: But you know, for me, just like with food, the
Speaker 1: crazier if they don't speak English. The more out of
Speaker 1: place I am, the better I enjoy it. How about you,
Speaker 1: you want to go to an exotic place where your
Speaker 1: number or you want to go with her some comfort.
Speaker 1: I will double down on that actually and turn it
Speaker 1: a little bit around. But I bet you can relate
Speaker 1: to it. My guess is knowing you, having read so
Speaker 1: much of what you've written and listening to your podcast,
Speaker 1: I get the feeling you'll really relate to this. I
Speaker 1: am the best version of myself when I'm traveling in
Speaker 1: a place, and I'm the best version of the best
Speaker 1: version of myself when I'm challenged the most. When I'm
Speaker 1: out of my comfort zone, I take more risks. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm less risk averse, I asked more questions. I'm not
Speaker 1: a smarty pants. I don't pretend. I like myself best
Speaker 1: when I have a bag over my shoulder and I'm
Speaker 1: walking across Ethiopia. That's the best version of me there is.
Speaker 1: I am curious, I am friendly, I am alert, I
Speaker 1: am open to everything. I'm teachable, I am spontaneous, I
Speaker 1: am all the things I want to be in my life.
Speaker 1: I am that person because of the challenges of travel
Speaker 1: is transformative. Travel is transformative. So consequently, what's amazing about
Speaker 1: it is that you can then export some of that
Speaker 1: back into your life in America. Right, So, like you
Speaker 1: in those places you mentioned, you were forced to do
Speaker 1: some new things, and you come back and changed human beings,
Speaker 1: sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big impactful ways, but
Speaker 1: you're changed. Travel is transformative. Okay, what are your favorite
Speaker 1: one or two cuisines? You know there's a song by
Speaker 1: Sunday Afternoon by the Kings and Ray Davis. You know,
Speaker 1: give me two good reasons why I ought to stay.
Speaker 1: So I usually say too, but you know I'm not
Speaker 1: holding you to the ones that you know, Hey, you
Speaker 1: gotta eat this cuisine for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: I'll answer it this way. The two most sophisticated cuisines
Speaker 1: for depth and breadth, for variety of ingredients, for variety
Speaker 1: of techniques, for uh, just just for just the deepest
Speaker 1: and the widest. And I think they are the two
Speaker 1: cuisines that sit atop the culinary in culinary Valhalla, are
Speaker 1: Chinese cuisine and Mexican cuisine. Now from that comes a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff. So if you go down to southeastern China,
Speaker 1: you're gonna eat fusion cuisine that has a lot of
Speaker 1: tie and vietnames. E vibe to it right, with fresh
Speaker 1: chilies and garlic and their version of fish sauce and
Speaker 1: things like that. Now, look, do I love the beauty
Speaker 1: and simplicity of Japanese cuisine? And Japanese cuisine is always
Speaker 1: the easy answer, or Italian cuisine. Every time I'm in France,
Speaker 1: I turned to whoever I'm traveling with, I'm going you
Speaker 1: know something, as cliches as it is, French food is
Speaker 1: fucking amazing. And it is. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, when I'm really being intellectual about it and
Speaker 1: I'm measuring all the strengths and weaknesses, I would rather
Speaker 1: take from high to low, bottom to top, side to side.
Speaker 1: Chinese and Mexican. I think they are the two cuisines
Speaker 1: that are the most complex in every measurable way. Uh
Speaker 1: we can. And I've eaten enough around the world to
Speaker 1: have some some perspective on that question. Eat out or
Speaker 1: stay home? Stay home? Just because you travel so much, No,
Speaker 1: I like to stay home and eat. Uh. Here's here's
Speaker 1: the difference I think from professional chefs. Um and certainly
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sixty. I've cooking for for money since
Speaker 1: I was fourteen, almost with you know, except for a
Speaker 1: couple of times. Here they're almost an unbroken line. Um,
Speaker 1: And I've had the experience of you know, I mean
Speaker 1: the food experiences that I've had eating out and traveling,
Speaker 1: I would put up against anyone's. I'm not sure the
Speaker 1: way that TV is no longer made in in oh
Speaker 1: will buy thirty or forty more episodes they buy eight.
Speaker 1: In the age of the streamer, they're buying eights and twelves.
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone will ever travel the world and
Speaker 1: eat the way Tony and I have had the opportunity
Speaker 1: to when we were doing what we were doing at
Speaker 1: Travel Channel. When we were doing that, I just don't
Speaker 1: I don't think it will ever happen again. Um and I.
Speaker 1: I love restaurants. I love the feeling of being in restaurants.
Speaker 1: I love seeing what other chefs are doing. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, and maybe it's more about
Speaker 1: the age that I am, Um, I have the ability
Speaker 1: to look so many different things. There's so many things
Speaker 1: I want to cook. I'm now it's switched around. Instead
Speaker 1: of like I have to fly to Hong Kong to
Speaker 1: eat at restaurant X. Instead of that, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: have to be able to get these ingredients so I
Speaker 1: can recreate this dish or series of dishes from this book,
Speaker 1: from this restaurant in Scandinavia that I've been dying to
Speaker 1: And I where am I gonna find baby seagulls legally
Speaker 1: in America? This is gonna be a toughie, but I
Speaker 1: gotta find him. Has got to recreate this dish. That
Speaker 1: is the stuff that excites me. Uh now, okay, hey
Speaker 1: was norma as good as the rep B. What are
Speaker 1: the two best restaurants you've ever been to? For you? Uh?
Speaker 1: Noma was because and is because not only is Renny
Speaker 1: Riseeppe is as phenomenal an executor of food. If you
Speaker 1: asked him to make you real scalapini, he would do
Speaker 1: with lawlessly. He has that skill set. It's like you've
Speaker 1: studied art. It's like the impressionists. You know, mon A
Speaker 1: man A, Sir, all those folks. They all went to
Speaker 1: the Accold, to Bozar and then they rejected it. They
Speaker 1: could literally paint a hand as if you were looking
Speaker 1: at a photograph, even though photographs haven't been invented. When
Speaker 1: they were paying the they once you can create a
Speaker 1: hand that looks like it does in real life, then
Speaker 1: you can create your impression of one. So these people
Speaker 1: who are doing molecular gastronomy or very progressive cuisine or
Speaker 1: cuisines that we see as being way out there, um,
Speaker 1: have the culinary skill set to do anything. They are
Speaker 1: masters of technique and craftspeople and so yes, Noma was.
Speaker 1: But it was also progressive in the sense that they
Speaker 1: were using ingredients from a part of the world that
Speaker 1: wasn't the southeastern United States or Mexico or Vietnamena where
Speaker 1: you can get so many things and everything grows and
Speaker 1: it's incredibly fertile. They were were working with a limited
Speaker 1: number of ingredients, doing a limited number of things. Um.
Speaker 1: So the answer is yes, it was two best meals
Speaker 1: of my life. Uh Well, prow house seafood house um
Speaker 1: off an island uh In at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: Filipino island chain just north of Borachai. Uh. You park
Speaker 1: your car in a field and you walk down a
Speaker 1: series of planks laid on logs in the mud. Thank God,
Speaker 1: the tide goes out at night when they're open, because
Speaker 1: the only way to walk to the restaurant, which is
Speaker 1: a hut in the middle of a tidal estuary, and
Speaker 1: the fishermen come by and push food and fish and
Speaker 1: vegetables up through a hole in the middle of the
Speaker 1: restaurants the whole middle of restaurant, like huge bunches of bananas.
Speaker 1: They were making a banana drink that night with ice
Speaker 1: that I had like sixteen of. But all the fish
Speaker 1: in the shrimp they you know, it's whatever the chef
Speaker 1: is making, and he makes batches this stuff and spreads
Speaker 1: it around every table. We probably had thirty seafood courses
Speaker 1: that night. Once you're there, you're there. You can stay
Speaker 1: for five hours, six hours if you like, or you
Speaker 1: can just walk back to your car at any point
Speaker 1: in time and pay your bill. Um. I wrote about
Speaker 1: it in my first book, UH one of the most
Speaker 1: transcendent food experiences of my life. UM. And then the
Speaker 1: second best one was at a um Uh, a little
Speaker 1: az tech village about two hours north of Mexico, two
Speaker 1: hours sorry south of Mexico City, um a town where
Speaker 1: there's a large number of people of ast Aztec descent
Speaker 1: still cooking pre contact, pre colonial food and still speaking
Speaker 1: what is essentially a dead language. But it's not dead
Speaker 1: because there's enough of them speaking it. But it's the
Speaker 1: last place to get a taste of history where these
Speaker 1: people that the oral tradition has passed these foods down.
Speaker 1: And there's a small, little six seat restaurant in the
Speaker 1: market there that a husband and wife run. Uh. That,
Speaker 1: to my mind, is still the one of the top
Speaker 1: meals that I've ever had in my life. I find
Speaker 1: it interesting when I think of that question, just without
Speaker 1: thinking about it. It's two restaurants that are as far
Speaker 1: off the grid and as far away from anything resembling
Speaker 1: tablecloths and silverware as anything I could think of. I think,
Speaker 1: the more stuff you have. Uh, sometimes we forget that
Speaker 1: food comes from the heart, not from the head. And
Speaker 1: those two food experiences were ones that I consider them
Speaker 1: a restaurant because number one, there was a financial transaction,
Speaker 1: but more importantly, there was an emotional transaction. I don't
Speaker 1: believe the history of restaurants by definition, is one that
Speaker 1: starts with a financial transaction. I believe it starts with
Speaker 1: a a an emotional transaction. Um, I think restaurants are
Speaker 1: thousands of years old, not hundreds as other historians think.
Speaker 1: And my favorite thing to argue them, um, and both
Speaker 1: of those restaurants gave me an emotional transaction experience that
Speaker 1: I think we're superior to anything else I've ever had,
Speaker 1: be it a temple of gastronomy or some great street
Speaker 1: food place or whatever they were. They price stand above
Speaker 1: and beyond all the others. Is the two best meals
Speaker 1: of my life. Okay, going back to the beginning, let's
Speaker 1: say money was no object. You know, the billionaires coffers
Speaker 1: were open. Do you believe this is fantasy land that
Speaker 1: as a result of foodie culture, et cetera, could we
Speaker 1: bring blue and Red together from the bottom via food
Speaker 1: is Would that even be possible because we're not bringing
Speaker 1: them together at the top. Yes, I believe. I mean
Speaker 1: and and Jose and I talked about this all the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: we need bigger tables. It's it's really that simple. We
Speaker 1: need bigger tables. I wanted to do a show called
Speaker 1: Dinner with the Dictator. Hopefully, if there's some network person
Speaker 1: listening for me, we'll we'll talk about it. Um, because
Speaker 1: of some of the places I've traveled and being the
Speaker 1: only person who's ever made TV in some of these places,
Speaker 1: or the first person to make TV there. Um, the
Speaker 1: head of the country wants to have dinner with you,
Speaker 1: and I don't believe in saying no, because I'm curious,
Speaker 1: even if that person is a international narco trafficker, terrorist,
Speaker 1: bad guy person, I want to go. I'm I'm an
Speaker 1: experienced collector and a storyteller, and so I want to
Speaker 1: go and see what that's like. And UM, I've never
Speaker 1: left a table having a meal with someone disliking them more.
Speaker 1: I've always understood more about them, and I believe if
Speaker 1: we actually sat down and broke bread in the literal
Speaker 1: sense with other human beings. I did a food dinner
Speaker 1: once for four hundred people in Aspen, Colorado. Uh. It
Speaker 1: was a buffet thing. We did whole roasted lambs, uh
Speaker 1: in two different ways, lots of sauces and sides. But
Speaker 1: I had assage, which is a North African Middle Eastern
Speaker 1: dome that's used to cook very thin flatbreads on and
Speaker 1: we're making bread to order. It only takes like thirty
Speaker 1: seconds and it's enough for like three or four people,
Speaker 1: so it kind of worked. As they came through the
Speaker 1: line and we're throwing these giant loaves of flat bread
Speaker 1: down into this basket and people would stare it, and
Speaker 1: I said, just you and these other two people in
Speaker 1: line with you, just grab it and tear it and
Speaker 1: break it. That's for you. Three. This pieces big, it's
Speaker 1: for you for this piece is smaller. It's for YouTube.
Speaker 1: And we'd actually have them physically break bread and watching
Speaker 1: them do that, this is seven or eight years ago,
Speaker 1: watching them smile and watching what happened when you physically
Speaker 1: broke a piece of bread with someone as you had
Speaker 1: by the way, people you did not know just reaffirmed
Speaker 1: for me. In addition to the hundreds of times I've
Speaker 1: sat down to eat with people I was sure I hated.
Speaker 1: I may leave. They're still knowing they're a bad human
Speaker 1: being doing bad things, and I don't believe in what
Speaker 1: they're doing, and I would still call the cops on
Speaker 1: them if I could, or whatever. But I understand more
Speaker 1: of them because I actually listened to them when we're
Speaker 1: at a meal. I believe the shouting ends and we
Speaker 1: can listen to them. What's heat in America? My MSNBC show,
Speaker 1: I had I had a meal with people who were
Speaker 1: on the other side of the issues. And in the
Speaker 1: case of the Secretary of State of Alabama, UM John
Speaker 1: Merrill at the time, someone who I thought was, you know,
Speaker 1: the architect of the Southern voters suppression UM and still
Speaker 1: a very very polarizing figure, and I believe a very
Speaker 1: very evil person, UH with with bad intent and UH
Speaker 1: and I and and the voting suppression issue in America
Speaker 1: is is one that I mean, I devoted a whole
Speaker 1: hour to it in What's Eating America? So I mean,
Speaker 1: you know where I stand on this. But in that
Speaker 1: What's Eating America episode, I actually dined with several people
Speaker 1: who were on the opposite side of the issue for me,
Speaker 1: and it changed none of my viewpoint about the issue,
Speaker 1: but I I got some insight into where they're coming from.
Speaker 1: Sufficient Two, if I was another politician or someone who
Speaker 1: was in that place to be able to work with
Speaker 1: them on something, could begin to do some things to
Speaker 1: at least put all put some hold, put some awareness,
Speaker 1: put some boundaries, make some improvements. The way we're going
Speaker 1: scares the ship out of me. I mean, this thing
Speaker 1: with vaccine, you know, we talk about restaurants. You know,
Speaker 1: these cities all around the country and restaurateurs. Danny most
Speaker 1: famously on CNBC the other day said, we want vaccine
Speaker 1: people have to show a vaccine card to make a
Speaker 1: reservation in the restaurant, right, So these vaccine mandates where
Speaker 1: you have to show your vacs to get into something.
Speaker 1: I do believe the federal government needs to come out
Speaker 1: and say that and take this awful burden off of
Speaker 1: restaurants and businesses and municipalities and states. We we we've
Speaker 1: got to start to do stuff like that. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's an option for it. But that's also going
Speaker 1: to create some real tension and some real escalation of
Speaker 1: trouble in this country, and I don't know if we're
Speaker 1: gonna be able to recover from it. It's a we're
Speaker 1: in a very, very dangerous time in America. Andrew, we
Speaker 1: could go on for another two hours. There's so many
Speaker 1: other things I wanted to ask you about. We'll have
Speaker 1: to wait for another time. You're fantastic your natural rock
Speaker 1: and tour. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you
Speaker 1: as a real, real honor and a privilege. I wanted
Speaker 1: to do this for a long time. I've been a
Speaker 1: big fan of what you do UH for several years now,
Speaker 1: and and this conversation I feel the exact same way.
Speaker 1: Next time I'm in Los Angeles and we if we
Speaker 1: can go out to eat, let's go share our meal somewhere.
Speaker 1: I would love that. Until next time. This is Bob
Speaker 1: left sitt