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Speaker 3: Hey Spencer and Yanni here before this episode of meat Eater,
Speaker 3: Yannie and I have a big announcement about a big announcement, Yannie.
Speaker 4: That's right, Meat Eater Live is coming to eight cities
Speaker 4: this December, and.
Speaker 3: We're going to tell you when and where to find
Speaker 3: us on Wednesday's episode of Trivia, So please tune in
Speaker 3: to Wednesday episode. At the very beginning, we're gonna give
Speaker 3: you all the details you want to know about where
Speaker 3: we're going to be, when we're going to be there,
Speaker 3: and how you can get tickets.
Speaker 5: Be there or b square.
Speaker 1: Uh trying to figure.
Speaker 6: It's a great start to start.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm gonna do a better start here, right, start over, Phil, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's throwing my glasses?
Speaker 5: They're fine, they're fine.
Speaker 1: I'm turning up my magnification.
Speaker 7: Is this one of those times where you're joking about
Speaker 7: cutting it out or you actually want to like start.
Speaker 5: Over, Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 1: Well, I was gonna talk. I don't know you decided
Speaker 1: later Phil, I was gonna So we recently, just to
Speaker 1: just bring people into up to speed. First off, this
Speaker 1: is my The episode is called well it's not. In
Speaker 1: the old days, it would have been called Mung Dudes
Speaker 1: Are Trouble, Part two, And we're joined by Yah Yang
Speaker 1: and in Year Yang Vang Year Vang and yeah you
Speaker 1: used to be Yeah, I used to be Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: that simplifies thing. How you guys, how well do you
Speaker 1: guys know what you've met in the past.
Speaker 5: Never met He's familiar with your food. Well, I listened
Speaker 5: to the pod with him on with you guys, but
Speaker 5: other than that.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: But he's he's you've eaten at his restaurant, Yeah, yeah, actually, yeah,
Speaker 2: probably doesn't know this, but I've been at like he
Speaker 2: caters fun fundraisers that you did the Monk Museum fundraisers.
Speaker 5: Oh sure that.
Speaker 2: You probably don't know this, but you did a a
Speaker 2: house catering party. This is pre pandemic, and it was
Speaker 2: in somebody's basement. You came to the house and I
Speaker 2: was in that party. It was for our fortieth birthday party.
Speaker 1: And they had your your.
Speaker 5: Team coach, I think I remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you were introducing us to like edible flowers
Speaker 2: and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, like among dudes don't if they meet, they
Speaker 1: don't necessarily like trade information.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean Steven Slay white people like, you know,
Speaker 5: it's different white people, but you are related.
Speaker 1: It's different white people, white people in America. If okay,
Speaker 1: if I was in if we have how many people
Speaker 1: are in this country three hundred three hundred three okay, okay,
Speaker 1: for me to run into a white dude born in America,
Speaker 1: that doesn't catch my attention. If I had been born
Speaker 1: in uh Laos, Okay, and uh was displaced by activities
Speaker 1: around the Vietnam War and wound up in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
Speaker 1: and I ran into another dude roughly my age who'd
Speaker 1: been through a similar set of circumstances, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like you'd be like, oh.
Speaker 5: Wow, yeah. I think the thing that people have to
Speaker 5: realize is in Minneapolis, there's seventy five thousand Mongk people
Speaker 5: in the metro, Is it really Yeah, seventy five thousand
Speaker 5: Mongk people in the metros.
Speaker 1: You can't keep track everybody.
Speaker 5: No, yeah, like we like we don't all subscribe to
Speaker 5: the same newsletter. But you know it's you know sometimes
Speaker 5: the media. Yeah, no, seventy five thousand. It's the largest,
Speaker 5: most concentrated among people out outside of China, the South
Speaker 5: China area where there's about two million there.
Speaker 4: But yeah, see, you guys have the problem of having
Speaker 4: too many of of your your your culture because if
Speaker 4: I meet a Latvian, I don't know, I don't know them.
Speaker 5: I know somebody that they know, they make they make well,
Speaker 5: even even with like the monk. Like, so the thing
Speaker 5: with the Mongk people is we have eighteen clans or
Speaker 5: eighteen last names, you know, so there's like our tribal
Speaker 5: names within that too. Like there's a way of finding
Speaker 5: out like you're related to somebody to you know, some way,
Speaker 5: if you go back far enough, you know, you'll always
Speaker 5: be like, oh yeah, so like that uncle's you know,
Speaker 5: aunt's cousin Da da da. And that's kind of what
Speaker 5: makes among people such a really strong united front. So
Speaker 5: like in the Twin Cities areas. They have what's called
Speaker 5: the eighteen Clan, where each clan has a representative that
Speaker 5: you know, and and they're kind it's kind of like
Speaker 5: the Jedi Council. I mean they have I mean I'm serious, dude,
Speaker 5: Like they come in, they meet and they have you know,
Speaker 5: they have like they put out you know, different you know, ideas,
Speaker 5: and they're like, okay, let's you know, go to your
Speaker 5: clan and then you know, tell them that, you know,
Speaker 5: this is what the new rule for this is. And
Speaker 5: then yeah, that's I mean they do that. I mean,
Speaker 5: so what rule for what is okay for? For example?
Speaker 5: So in our culture some culture, I mean you could
Speaker 5: you know, yeah, you can help me on this, yeah, Dowery, Dowery.
Speaker 5: Still it's still part of our culture. Dowry Yep, Yep.
Speaker 5: That's a good deal, dude, if you is that? Is
Speaker 5: that just symbolic now or is there like some substance
Speaker 5: to it a little bit? I mean there's some symbolic
Speaker 5: stuff to it. There's some you know that there's like
Speaker 5: all these like inside yeah, there's all these inside mung jokes,
Speaker 5: you know, like like it's it's a it's like one
Speaker 5: of those things where now I mean at points where
Speaker 5: it's like, for example, you can trace back to like
Speaker 5: so for examples like the Yang clan wrong, the More
Speaker 5: clan this way, and you can trace it back and
Speaker 5: then the dowry they'll be fines in the dollar. He's no,
Speaker 5: I'm just using for example, Yeah, and and and you
Speaker 5: can trace it back Steve Steve's he's like clan Trouble
Speaker 5: and Mu culture. Let's yeah, yeah, we find something definitely.
Speaker 5: And then they would be like, oh, well we can
Speaker 5: find that group this much, and then you know, and
Speaker 5: then it'd be like, oh, the dowary is like twenty
Speaker 5: five k or something, you know. And you know, so
Speaker 5: I think one of the things that they kind of
Speaker 5: started talking about is just the ridiculousness of these fines
Speaker 5: that are huge, and these young couples are like, I
Speaker 5: don't have the money for this, you know. And so
Speaker 5: there was, you know, there was kind of these rules
Speaker 5: that were put out or saying, hey, let's kind of
Speaker 5: demolish all this kind of tribal conflict from from generations
Speaker 5: and generations ago. And so you know, they put out
Speaker 5: a big statement about that. You know.
Speaker 2: Also they also capped the the dowry a set amount
Speaker 2: so that everybody should just follow that versus otherwise. It
Speaker 2: is a it goes all night negotiation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know how I just got caught being racist,
Speaker 1: like thinking you guys knew each other. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you something.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Normally when a white guy gets caught being racist, he'll
Speaker 1: do stuff like he'll be like, well, I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: more listening than talking, right, I'm not, well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do more talking to listening because let me tell you something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: has been pitching you to us.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was like, you should have this guy on. So
Speaker 1: eventually where we got you to where we got you
Speaker 1: to come on, we said to yeah, you should come
Speaker 1: out and hang out.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Is that bad?
Speaker 5: I feel like that's great. No, No, it's it's awesome.
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny. My buddy Jordan, he like wrote
Speaker 5: in a little something so on his episode, I was like,
Speaker 5: this guy's awesome, my best friend.
Speaker 1: So you did it too.
Speaker 5: In June of twenty twenty one, I pulled it up today.
Speaker 5: It took me some doing, but in Gmail, I was
Speaker 5: like I totally sent an email. I now I don't
Speaker 5: know if I, you know, wrote it well or not
Speaker 5: and I know you did the same thing and the
Speaker 5: same thing he wrote, the guys I'd like to know
Speaker 5: each other. And it was more so, this is another
Speaker 5: great I know, white guy. It's not exactly what I said.
Speaker 5: I feel like that's not what I'm saying. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, and Jordian said the same thing, you know,
Speaker 5: and and he's like, hey, you know, and and then
Speaker 5: I kind of it was really funny Stevee like, especially
Speaker 5: with the whole crew here, I kind of he told me,
Speaker 5: I'm sending the scene on the mediator. Maybe they'll have
Speaker 5: you out sometimes. I'm like, I prophesied, yeah. And then
Speaker 5: I'm like, cool, bro, if you do, and I get
Speaker 5: to go, I'll bring you and we like both laughed
Speaker 5: and we're like ha ha ha. And then that was
Speaker 5: where he is, can you introduce yourself?
Speaker 1: Done a horrible job introducing there, But I don't we
Speaker 1: haven't even got into Yanni's Mountain.
Speaker 5: Sorry, yeah, sorry, Yannie, I don't just do it. Do
Speaker 5: it quick?
Speaker 1: You plug yourself, plug your Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so Yabang we from Minneapolis area. We have a
Speaker 5: restaurant called Union Munk Kitchen and then we're building out
Speaker 5: a second one that's in the works and hopefully I'll
Speaker 5: be finalized by this week. Called v n I, which
Speaker 5: is the refugee camp that my parents met in I
Speaker 5: was born in. Over ninety thousand Mong people went through
Speaker 5: there from seventy five to ninety two, and so we
Speaker 5: wanted to name this restaurant v n I. It's our
Speaker 5: first big brick and mortar project. It I tell people,
Speaker 5: it's a love letter to my mom and dad. So
Speaker 5: that's what that restaurant will be when we get done,
Speaker 5: hopefully twenty twenty four. Springtime. Great, but yeah we have
Speaker 5: we have other restaurants and all the other little things
Speaker 5: we do.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna we're gonna dive into your
Speaker 1: your food and your past and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 8: We worked off of just that little pitch, the like
Speaker 8: I want one on the list love letter to mom
Speaker 8: and dad.
Speaker 5: I'm sold. Yeah, it's been It's been really fun, man,
Speaker 5: it's been really fun.
Speaker 1: So Ryan Callahan still me and then go ahead.
Speaker 5: And my name's Jordan Vold, college buddy of you. We
Speaker 5: went to school UW Lacrosse US years ago.
Speaker 1: And you're the guy. He said. If he comes out
Speaker 1: of the show you're coming.
Speaker 5: To tattooed on his parm right there.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 6: I gotta get one of them.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's nothing like a bluegill.
Speaker 1: No, my kid has one now in a tank, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna saytoo tank. I love that thing so much. Man,
Speaker 1: we feed it like worms and stuff with that bluegill
Speaker 1: is trained. Now he used to be kind of spooky
Speaker 1: that when you come in the room. Now that bluegill
Speaker 1: is lined up.
Speaker 5: That w I don't want to get way into it.
Speaker 5: But two summers ago I never met my dad's dad,
Speaker 5: my paternal grandfather. He loved you know, he's loved to fish,
Speaker 5: fish bluegill like any good Wisconsin. I never met him.
Speaker 5: Was fishing with my dad and his brother, my uncle Ron,
Speaker 5: and he had like a picture counter. I don't know
Speaker 5: if people do that to like count how many fish
Speaker 5: sugar the boat to make sure we him later yuh
Speaker 5: hit the clicker, and my dad and my uncle Ron
Speaker 5: were just saying, Grandpa, you know, our dad, my grandpa,
Speaker 5: who I never met, would have loved this. And I
Speaker 5: was just you know that moment, I was like, that'd
Speaker 5: be cool, it'd be cool to do, you know.
Speaker 1: I was telling my kids about the other day because
Speaker 1: I was saying to them, I can't wait till that
Speaker 1: bluegill turns into a keeper. They're like, you know, I
Speaker 1: can eat no what I mean, Like, Dad just wanted
Speaker 1: to be that looking in the aquarium and it's like
Speaker 1: a keeper bluegill in there. And I was telling him
Speaker 1: when I was a little cap member, my dad made
Speaker 1: us sticks that were six inches long with your name
Speaker 1: written on it, and if you were fishing bluegills, you
Speaker 1: had to have that stick. And if it wasn't as
Speaker 1: long as that stick, you didn't bring it home. Because
Speaker 1: he so sick of c four or four inch blue gills.
Speaker 5: Yep, y.
Speaker 4: I told you my little story about the neighbor that
Speaker 4: fished with in North Carolina.
Speaker 5: He's a neighbor of my in laws.
Speaker 4: And he used to be like, had his sales or something,
Speaker 4: and Rey's fishing tackle maybe anyway, so he went and
Speaker 4: saw a lot of tackle dealers, tackle makers, et cetera.
Speaker 4: And he said he had been in the place where
Speaker 4: there's a bunch of aquariums with large mouthed bass in them.
Speaker 4: He walked in there once with other dudes with white
Speaker 4: coats on, and as you walked down these aquariums.
Speaker 5: The fish would.
Speaker 4: All just turn and watch these and the guys be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's time for a new batch, because like, you can't
Speaker 4: test a lure on a fish that it's just like
Speaker 4: waiting drop something into the association.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're to come right. Back's got a story. I
Speaker 1: don't even know. I don't even know the story. I
Speaker 1: don't even know what it is. Chester's here.
Speaker 6: Yep. Well, my mom was in labor with me on
Speaker 6: Mullet Lake while my dad and Mullet were fishing bluegills.
Speaker 1: Keep back. I just got so distracted.
Speaker 5: She was in the boat as well.
Speaker 6: We went into labor and there were fishing bluegills on
Speaker 6: Mullet Lake, so.
Speaker 5: So it was like a race to get your limit.
Speaker 6: That's my connection to bluegills.
Speaker 1: Holds fishing wall eyes. The day your kid was born.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, Yangs here, thanks for coming. Yeah, of
Speaker 1: course you're gonna hit youth turkeys with us again. Of course,
Speaker 1: you know they're they're they're gonna it's things are moving
Speaker 1: along to get youth season to four days. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: And your daughter got a turkey after we hunted together.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, and you.
Speaker 1: Got a buck.
Speaker 5: Last year, you got a buck. Last year, I got
Speaker 5: a turkey.
Speaker 1: This year you did. Yeah. Oh that's right, you said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. All r Yeah, you're ready to tell this. Oh,
Speaker 1: can I tell one thing before you tell your thing?
Speaker 1: You bet? Yeah, he's got a mountain lion story. It's
Speaker 1: not You're not in it, though, are you?
Speaker 5: No? Okay, second hand.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to think. I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: a way to plug my buddy's uh business again, not
Speaker 1: just thought of it. Uh, Chester explained the tax exchange
Speaker 1: we just had.
Speaker 6: Uh. Steve introduced me to his buddy, Matt Matt Tros.
Speaker 6: Matt Tros, he's got a little bar yet he opened
Speaker 6: up mobile bar, and uh.
Speaker 1: Is there a direct sale of alcohol with this mobile bar?
Speaker 6: Uh? Well, no, you have to supply, you have to
Speaker 6: buy the boots.
Speaker 1: Other Let's say you live in northern Michigan and you're
Speaker 1: having an event, Yes, fiftieth wedding anniversary, a regular wedding.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but we didn't just have that in the text exchange.
Speaker 1: No, I'm just helping. Like I said, I was using
Speaker 1: this as a jump off point. And you want to
Speaker 1: have a great experience for your guests. So what you
Speaker 1: do is you go to Roaming n o m I
Speaker 1: Roaming Northern Michigan but is not Roaming Nomi dot com.
Speaker 1: My buddy's a school teacher. This is his summertime business.
Speaker 1: He has a camper trailer rigged up like a bar.
Speaker 1: When you're doing your event and you're you know, you
Speaker 1: get married, you're like serving booze. Anyways, he helps you
Speaker 1: figure out what your booze order needs to be. You
Speaker 1: call in and pay for your booze at the booze store.
Speaker 1: He picks the booze up, brings his mobile camper bar.
Speaker 1: Two year event. Him and his wife worked there, work
Speaker 1: at it. They then open the window and your guests
Speaker 1: at your wedding go up to the bar. They do
Speaker 1: signature drinks, custom cocktails. They take care of everything.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 1: And nothing to gain from this pretty soon if you
Speaker 1: want it. And Chester has just out of the kindness
Speaker 1: of his little heart.
Speaker 6: My parents own a cocktail garnish company out of Wisconsin.
Speaker 6: So if you go to any grocery store liquor store
Speaker 6: and you look for garnishes, it's probably forest flour foods.
Speaker 6: But now you're going to be able to go to
Speaker 6: Matt Drozer's mobile box, Droast Drost and.
Speaker 5: Order a bloody makes a Western big game.
Speaker 6: But you're going to be able to order a bloody
Speaker 6: Mary and he's gonna have all the fixings for it.
Speaker 6: Or you're gonna be able to order an old fashion.
Speaker 6: You'll get a sweet pickled mushroom as a garnish or
Speaker 6: really whatever you want. Nice cherries for kitty, cocktail for
Speaker 6: your kids. Maybe even we throw those in there too.
Speaker 1: But I got more Matt Droll stories, and you'd be
Speaker 1: able to stomach we used to drink. I remember Mad
Speaker 1: Dog twenty twenty.
Speaker 9: Well, I don't really remember it, but I like Matt.
Speaker 9: I feel like he had a thirty thirty rifle. We
Speaker 9: used to call him MD thirty thirty because like mad Dog,
Speaker 9: you know that's not a good one.
Speaker 1: I got some good if I do have some good ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's not get into Mad Dog twenty twenty stories.
Speaker 1: All right. The Mountain Lion story.
Speaker 4: Okay, so this story comes from my buddy Jeff Flood,
Speaker 4: who I met through Bart George, who's our big game
Speaker 4: biologist friends. It works out, yeah, for the coutiney tribe
Speaker 4: in Washington and our buddy Bruce help Bart with a
Speaker 4: mountain lion collaring project that you can I forget which
Speaker 4: episode it is. Maybe Karent will plug it in, but
Speaker 4: you can hear all about it. When we had bart
Speaker 4: On telling us about this coloring study there.
Speaker 1: What episode is that kar it was?
Speaker 5: You know, I remember it was. It was COVID.
Speaker 7: It was early COVID because I remember we came and
Speaker 7: it was like mid twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. It was remote because of COVID.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they're they're researching like how much if they
Speaker 4: can deter lions from being around humans by playing loud
Speaker 4: human voices to them repeatedly. That's not what they're doing.
Speaker 1: It's a little more complicated, but go ahead.
Speaker 4: Well, I know I'm trying to simplify it so I
Speaker 4: can get to the main part of the story. So
Speaker 4: to do this, they call they catch cats and they
Speaker 4: collar them, and they catch them the first time using
Speaker 4: hounds and they collar them, and then when they come back,
Speaker 4: they know the location of the cat because it's been collared,
Speaker 4: and they can walk up to it playing usually the
Speaker 4: Meter podcast at a loud volume, and then they measure
Speaker 4: at what point the cat runs how far it runs.
Speaker 1: Because they're creating an association. Yes, in this cat's mind,
Speaker 1: they're creating association between trouble and human voices.
Speaker 4: That's right, because after they hear the human voices, the
Speaker 4: hounds are released and then they're sort of you know,
Speaker 4: run agitated by hounds up into a tree and.
Speaker 5: They make that association.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they do that repeatedly, and then they you know,
Speaker 4: take the data. So it's ongoing study.
Speaker 1: This being because in the old days, if a lion
Speaker 1: so much has looked at a person, it was dead,
Speaker 1: And nowadays there's a little less social tolerance for that,
Speaker 1: for lethal control of right.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, there's a lot of stuff going on over
Speaker 4: there in north east Washington. We won't get into it
Speaker 4: with just the whole the controversies around mountain lions and
Speaker 4: people and.
Speaker 1: Just the state and the governor and the Game commission.
Speaker 1: We need to do a dedicated episode on that.
Speaker 5: Oh man.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we're hustling hard on getting actual current commissioners signed
Speaker 8: off on interviews and stuff like that. I think everybody
Speaker 8: over there knows that they're not really well received right now,
Speaker 8: so we're not making a lot of headway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my least favorite governor in America used to be
Speaker 1: Murphy over New Jersey because he campaigned against bear hunts,
Speaker 1: and my new least favorite governor is Insley in Washington.
Speaker 4: Go on, so they call Heed a female off of
Speaker 4: a deer kill in late March, and a lot of
Speaker 4: times this is Jeff doing this work.
Speaker 5: A lot of times.
Speaker 4: What Jeff does is if he sees a deer kill
Speaker 4: and it's there's enough carcass left, he'll throw up a
Speaker 4: camera just to see what happens. Right, So he threw
Speaker 4: up a camera and in the first night, four adult
Speaker 4: lions and two kittens show up that night. So he
Speaker 4: just said, needless to say, it didn't last long. This
Speaker 4: is that's kind of a little side story to the
Speaker 4: main story.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: He figures, with that pressure, this mountain lion uh moved
Speaker 4: a couple miles away. The next time they went to
Speaker 4: uh to to catch her. They when they from the
Speaker 4: other line from the other lions, and she he figures
Speaker 4: now that he knows what he knows now that it
Speaker 4: was because she was about to give birth, so she
Speaker 4: moved a ways away, didn't want to be by the lions.
Speaker 4: So the next time they catch her, she's given that
Speaker 4: he can tell that she has kittens, because she's lactating.
Speaker 4: So they follow the back trail on the GPS of
Speaker 4: where they had first bumped her, and sure enough there
Speaker 4: is three kittens. Like they're in a pile I put up.
Speaker 4: I had a picture of it on my Instagram. They
Speaker 4: were holding the kittens, so they put a he puts
Speaker 4: a camera on the kittens. What was interesting? Sorry, I'm
Speaker 4: trying to read an email while I relate this story,
Speaker 4: so I get.
Speaker 5: The numbers right. Uh.
Speaker 4: He figures they were about ten days old, and uh,
Speaker 4: he said he thought it was interesting that how how
Speaker 4: long sometimes she would leave all of them sometimes? And
Speaker 4: again this is just through watching pictures on a trail camp,
Speaker 4: so you never know if mom's just behind the camera
Speaker 4: or next to it not getting picked up. But at
Speaker 4: some point seven hours she would leave them, oh by
Speaker 4: that and not be there on May fourth at eleven
Speaker 4: eight eleven am it can yeh?
Speaker 1: Can this be like this be commented on as you go?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: The reason I don't surprise me is it would be
Speaker 1: that feeding itself is just more involved, right, exactly, like
Speaker 1: a deer could just go grays whatever, twenty minutes right,
Speaker 1: come back, grays, come back. But for that thing, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's headed.
Speaker 5: Out right hunting.
Speaker 1: It's not like a mission. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So it sees that they would need to be able
Speaker 1: to do like some kind of lengthy stash, because it's
Speaker 1: not like, hey, I'll be back in an hour, sure,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 4: And I guess that the reason you would think that
Speaker 4: it is a long time is because you would think that, oh,
Speaker 4: how are those kittens going to survive that long without
Speaker 4: being able to get a little milk in a seven
Speaker 4: hour period?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: So may fourth, first thing in the morning, she moves
Speaker 4: her first kitten, grabs it by the back of the neck,
Speaker 4: walks off with it, doesn't come back until six pm.
Speaker 5: To get grab this.
Speaker 1: What time did I grab the first one?
Speaker 5: Eight am?
Speaker 4: So who knows how far it moves it, but comes
Speaker 4: back at six pm to grab the second one and
Speaker 4: moves it same day. One kitten left.
Speaker 5: Right, It's like a bad children's book, but at a
Speaker 5: parent at midnight. At midnight that next morning.
Speaker 1: I want to make sure I'm getting on. So it's
Speaker 1: the first one at what time?
Speaker 5: Six am?
Speaker 1: Okay? Then comes back in the afternoon eight No?
Speaker 5: Eight? Well what did I say? No? Eight am and
Speaker 5: six pm? Okay?
Speaker 1: So it gets one to eight am, brings it wherever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: comes back that evening six pm. Now there's one sitting
Speaker 1: there into the dark.
Speaker 5: And at midnight a skunk shows up. Oh yeah.
Speaker 4: And again it's not like documented by pictures, but the
Speaker 4: skunk was there for quite some time. There was blood
Speaker 4: on the skunk. Mom showed up the next day and
Speaker 4: spent five hours there just like looking around and doing
Speaker 4: circles before she left, and then he never saw it again.
Speaker 4: The skunk eighth the kitten, whether it ate it or
Speaker 4: it just killed it, you know, but I mean think about.
Speaker 5: From this skunk's perspective, that's a big win.
Speaker 4: Yeah, take it out now, that's one lass dude later
Speaker 4: taking me out or my you know kid.
Speaker 6: Do you know how big these kittens are at what.
Speaker 4: Tiny this stage? Like I mean, you know, little fur balls.
Speaker 4: I mean not not not even the size of a housecatt.
Speaker 1: That's a cold blooded skunk.
Speaker 8: I want to understand Mom's like decision making to like
Speaker 8: how does she select a kitten. Is it totally random?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah?
Speaker 5: Or is she like yeah, oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like my big favorite one, the best kitten, right,
Speaker 1: the one in the middle is the best kitten.
Speaker 8: The first one to leave is super exposed or is
Speaker 8: it less sent If you're the first one, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: The middle is the favorite. I would think the middle
Speaker 1: it's like, I'm gonna bring the one I like, the
Speaker 1: one I really don't like. I'll figure it out later.
Speaker 1: The one I sort of like, I'm gonna bring it
Speaker 1: now to pioneer this new spot. If it looks good,
Speaker 1: I'll go get my favorite one, and then if I
Speaker 1: got time later, I'll get my least favorite one. We
Speaker 1: should write a Maybe we could publish an academic article
Speaker 1: about this called Favoritism, uh favor and Feline con Colorists.
Speaker 5: Or just writing a children's book, writing.
Speaker 1: Children's book called tough Luck.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you can do little backstories on each of the
Speaker 8: kittens and be like, this is why Mom picked you
Speaker 8: as the middle one.
Speaker 1: I have a picture of my daughter on my phone.
Speaker 1: In the other day, she's saying, the reason I have
Speaker 1: her on my phone is otherwise i'd forget about her
Speaker 1: because she's the middle. Where you're like, honey, you're not wrong,
Speaker 1: because she's the middle.
Speaker 5: Keep a lot of things on my phone that I
Speaker 5: don't want to forget about. Also, that's episode two that
Speaker 5: it's called an elk hunting nudist checks the breeze.
Speaker 1: God's a good title, dude.
Speaker 4: It's called an elk hunting nudist checks the breeze. If
Speaker 4: you want to learn all about Bart George's mountaining collaring
Speaker 4: study in Northeast Washington.
Speaker 1: It was a good title.
Speaker 5: Listen.
Speaker 1: We had a good run at just having titles that
Speaker 1: didn't mean anything. What happened we started naming them stuff
Speaker 1: that means something.
Speaker 5: Search engine optimization because.
Speaker 1: Because now with the shows on YouTube, it doesn't work
Speaker 1: to have you can't have a name that has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with anything. Meaning if you name something a.
Speaker 7: Nudist or push.
Speaker 1: Them to pot or a nudist checks the breeze, you'll
Speaker 1: wind up in like a different land.
Speaker 4: Would tell you that that would have been the same
Speaker 4: case on other platforms.
Speaker 1: I resisted the idea. Here's the thing I resisted and
Speaker 1: still resist the idea that people search podcasts. I don't,
Speaker 1: you'll hear people some people do. I don't believe that
Speaker 1: people regularly do content searches for podcasts, meaning I don't
Speaker 1: think people go in and search key do keyword searches
Speaker 1: around podcasts. Some do, but I don't think that's how
Speaker 1: I don't think that's how people discover.
Speaker 6: Searching for people maybe like certain folks.
Speaker 1: Sure, and when we and we would we would bow
Speaker 1: to that in some respects with our old naming convention.
Speaker 1: But now here's another I'll tell you that that would
Speaker 1: surprise me. What's actually the words that we're actually saying
Speaker 1: right now actually matters for how how YouTube serves. You
Speaker 1: could name it like a nudist checks the breeze, but
Speaker 1: then never talk about nudists and all that, And it'll
Speaker 1: be served based on content, but the thumbnail people see
Speaker 1: is based on It'll be served based on what's actually
Speaker 1: done within the show. The thumbnail people see will be
Speaker 1: what you present them. So if you have, like if
Speaker 1: you're talking about mountain lions, mountain lions, mountain lions, it
Speaker 1: might go to a person that loves mountain lions, what
Speaker 1: that person is going to see is a nudist checks
Speaker 1: the breeze, and he'll think, why is this here for
Speaker 1: this reason? Am I doing a good job explaining this?
Speaker 1: Krin Is it?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 8: Like our guests today, Donald Trump and Joe Rogan are
Speaker 8: talking about transgender rights in bathrooms, and that could possibly
Speaker 8: help this episode pop up in people searchings.
Speaker 5: Nailed it.
Speaker 1: That's next level, right there, man. You satisfied with that?
Speaker 1: Krin Kriinn satisfied with that? Uh. A couple of quick
Speaker 1: things we got touched on.
Speaker 5: The road to twenty twenty four. Go ahead, Steve.
Speaker 1: We covered Roamingnomai dot com again. Probably hit that a
Speaker 1: couple more times in the future. Vegan Landlords, this is
Speaker 1: a this is a chatticate question. Chester. Do you know
Speaker 1: about this?
Speaker 6: Well? I just read it, yes or whatever?
Speaker 1: Uh, oh, we'll cover it. He was listening to the
Speaker 1: Pussing the Pot episode, so the Pussing to Pot t
Speaker 1: shirts came out. But they're gone already, but we didn't
Speaker 1: order that many.
Speaker 7: Are we gonna order more?
Speaker 1: I don't know. They were gone in less than a day.
Speaker 1: I sunk a gaff into an octopus's arm, and he
Speaker 1: got the gaff away from me and snuck off with it.
Speaker 1: And I'll point out they can lose their arm, it
Speaker 1: doesn't bother them. They just grow a new one. So
Speaker 1: then we started laughing about how that octopus probably doesn't
Speaker 1: go anywhere without that gaff.
Speaker 5: Snuck off with it as an interesting way to put
Speaker 5: hold it.
Speaker 1: Out of my hands. We had got in the wrestling
Speaker 1: match and he got away with the gaff. It's a
Speaker 1: big one, but the gaff isn't barbed, so the gaff
Speaker 1: would have just fallen out either way. It's funny to
Speaker 1: think of an octopus now, because you know he likes
Speaker 1: he uses the gaff for everything.
Speaker 6: He's gonna come back and get you.
Speaker 1: Out if he wants to get something out of a hole.
Speaker 1: He's like stand back boys, and he just gets that
Speaker 1: gaff out and does what he needs to do with it.
Speaker 8: Anywhere, a little subtle tapping on the bottom of your boat.
Speaker 1: We're waiting for someday that gaff hoot up through the
Speaker 1: bottom of my boat. I'd be like, he's back. We
Speaker 1: made a shirt of an octopus with a gaff, but
Speaker 1: it's gone. But anyways, on that episode, we were talking
Speaker 1: about I can't remember, oh, we were talking about a vegan.
Speaker 1: We were talking about vegan landlords that were in the
Speaker 1: news for people which I supported the right to do this.
Speaker 1: A landlord saying I'll rent to you, but if I
Speaker 1: rent to you, you are not allowed to cook meat.
Speaker 1: I don't like it, but I support that right because
Speaker 1: I generally am like you know, I'm generally supportive of
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. So, and the thing to maintain
Speaker 1: consistency to see in this world, it'd be like people
Speaker 1: that get really worked up about First Amendment rights only
Speaker 1: when their First Amendment rights are imperiled, but they're very
Speaker 1: slow to defend First Amendment rights of their adversaries. So
Speaker 1: the NC double A, not the NC double A. That's
Speaker 1: the basketball people and the N DOUBLEACP. The N DOUBLEACP
Speaker 1: will often defend the First Amendment rights of white supremacists
Speaker 1: because there's so staunchly First Amendment that they'll defend the
Speaker 1: First Amendment rights of people who'd probably like to kill them. So,
Speaker 1: because I think that people should have more latitude to make,
Speaker 1: you know, like just more latitude to make these sorts
Speaker 1: of decisions around their own home and how you rent
Speaker 1: your home, I was like, eh, okay, I don't like it,
Speaker 1: but I would never tell someone that they should have
Speaker 1: to rent a house to someone doing something like that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm just trying it on, so I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I'm committed there, go ahead.
Speaker 7: I wasn't there because this was recorded in Alaska, but
Speaker 7: if I were there, I would have reminded you that.
Speaker 7: In the Chettiquette episode with Luke Combs, we got a
Speaker 7: question about a landlord who would not rent a home
Speaker 7: to gun owners, and I told them the said.
Speaker 5: Lie and do it anyway.
Speaker 1: Well, if I heard from someone who if I heard
Speaker 1: from someone who said, my landlord rendered me a house
Speaker 1: and said I can't cook meat, but I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: cooking some, I would say I think that you should.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: Sure, So I am. It is consistent. Okay, listen, I'm
Speaker 1: not like a judge. I'm not like judge Jude. I'm
Speaker 1: very aware of you, just like I gots what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: But this guy here has got a different situation, but
Speaker 1: it made him think of it where he he's part
Speaker 1: of the story. I don't understand. He used to live
Speaker 1: in a rural area, but due to residency rules, had
Speaker 1: to move into the city. What would that mean? Oh,
Speaker 1: this is exactly what you're talking about. Uh No, English,
Speaker 1: You lived by the horror mel factory.
Speaker 5: Well I go down there. That's like two hour drive
Speaker 5: north the south. Yeah, okay, you you yeah, when you
Speaker 5: drive two hours.
Speaker 1: From your home is the place where they make spam?
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 1: And you're saying the executive leadership team at Spam.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in their bylaws, they have to live down in Austin, Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Okay, So this fella might have run into a similar
Speaker 1: thing because he's saying, I used to live out in
Speaker 1: the sticks, but because of residency rules, he had to
Speaker 1: move into the city. Yeah, he's in Buffalo, New York.
Speaker 1: So he's not working down there with Spam.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but what one of the like, while you were
Speaker 5: talking about that, if you talk to the landlord and
Speaker 5: the landlord says, hey, you know, no cooking meat here,
Speaker 5: is it okay? Just to move on to another apartment
Speaker 5: or another house, Like, do you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 5: because like that's what the landworth. Okay, cool, Oh yeah,
Speaker 5: that's yeah, that's I would be in that situation where
Speaker 5: they're like, you can't cook me, and here I'm.
Speaker 1: Like, okay, cool, I'm gonna move.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll go find some in the place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or I'm gonna cook it anyway, call the cops.
Speaker 5: I I gotta throw this out there.
Speaker 8: This is like the best article I've seen in a
Speaker 8: long time, and it really strikes me because I used
Speaker 8: to have to travel around the country with a practicing
Speaker 8: vegan and that person was obnoxious, and it was adamant
Speaker 8: that I go to these vegan restaurants in different places,
Speaker 8: and I always was just like, it is not worth
Speaker 8: my money. But my assumption was that the experience would
Speaker 8: be a lot different than what it was. And I
Speaker 8: was actually like appalled when I finally did sit down
Speaker 8: at a vegan restaurant to see all of my food
Speaker 8: terms on the menu.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, right, the steal from you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I was like, well, what, like, I'm down for
Speaker 8: a salad, but you have like it's bacon, yeah, reuben
Speaker 8: and fries and so that I got to hand it
Speaker 8: to whoever wrote this article, but it's called no more
Speaker 8: Cordon bleuir. France's long running battle over vegan food names
Speaker 8: has escalated as the government published a decree banning meaty
Speaker 8: terms such as steak, grill or spare ribs being used
Speaker 8: to describe plant based products.
Speaker 1: I think that's a little bit of government overreach.
Speaker 5: I love it.
Speaker 8: That's what government overreach is. I have a fully embracing.
Speaker 1: I like it. Yeah, you know that we covered that
Speaker 1: little dust up. I'm going to come back to the
Speaker 1: story about this guy. But we covered that little dust
Speaker 1: up where that dude, this is the weirdest thing is,
Speaker 1: oh my god, it's one story turned into another here.
Speaker 1: So he got three stories up in the air. Story
Speaker 1: one is this.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 1: Story one is this fella here that we're talking about
Speaker 1: who had to move to town because of the rules. Okay,
Speaker 1: so hold that in your head. Story two is how
Speaker 1: is this these French people in your situation? There's four stories.
Speaker 1: Story three is that we covered how a guy was
Speaker 1: suing buffalo wild wings because they're boneless wings aren't wings?
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're technically not wings, but whatever.
Speaker 1: Buffalo wild wings. Retort was, am I using retort in
Speaker 1: the right way? Allow me to retort? Yeah? Yeah, Buffalo
Speaker 1: wild wings retort was, we don't sell any buffalo. Our
Speaker 1: hamburgers are not ham. Our chicken fingers are not chicken's fingers.
Speaker 1: So it should not come to you as a great
Speaker 1: surprise that our boneless wings are not wings.
Speaker 5: In this article, they're just buffalo's wings either.
Speaker 1: No, no, I'm into story four. In this article, they
Speaker 1: interview some dude who is like a who's made this
Speaker 1: whole issue like his axe to grind. But he's not
Speaker 1: the litigant, he's not the person suing Buffalo wild but
Speaker 1: he's a person who believes, and they talk about him
Speaker 1: in the article that he believes they should be called
Speaker 1: saucy Nugs, and somehow he weasels his way into the article.
Speaker 1: I'm standing at a book event. I'm doing a book
Speaker 1: signing event, and there's some guy in line that looks
Speaker 1: like not like everybody else that would come to one
Speaker 1: of my book signing events. Meaning most of my stuff
Speaker 1: is like some dude in square toe cowboy boots with
Speaker 1: like three kids, because it's.
Speaker 5: A children's recognizable demographic.
Speaker 1: But then here's this guy that I know said I've
Speaker 1: been using a lot of people looking like weird Al
Speaker 1: because I was talking about Gallagher the comedian. Here's a
Speaker 1: guy that looks like young weird Al comes up to
Speaker 1: me and basically he's there to tell me that they
Speaker 1: should call him Saucy Nugs, but does not know that
Speaker 1: we discussed this on the podcast. Like this guy independently
Speaker 1: just goes to anywhere he can get an audience.
Speaker 5: Wait, he was the guy that was in the article.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's about this in the pockets. He had no idea.
Speaker 5: He's just I'm just he's just just Arilla market.
Speaker 1: He's like sounds like there's going to be a crowd.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go down there and and and.
Speaker 5: Protack, raise hell about Wow. Yeah, really that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Back to story number one.
Speaker 6: But if they call them saucy nugs, then some back
Speaker 6: stoner could come in there and think that it's some
Speaker 6: ganja and sue him for that.
Speaker 1: Old man. You guys call weed saucy nugs.
Speaker 6: I'm sure something out there.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you want to talk about some saucy nugs.
Speaker 1: You ever see uh Chester's tattoo on his arm?
Speaker 6: Okay? Moving on too many stories.
Speaker 8: This comes down to, uh, why the FDA exists, right,
Speaker 8: like patent medicine, okay, And that is why you cannot
Speaker 8: call a vegan whatever it is, sandwich a ruben sandwich. Yeah,
Speaker 8: everybody knows corn beef okay, and pastrami does not cut
Speaker 8: it as a ruben sandwich either.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Before back of this guy had to move into town.
Speaker 1: I do want to pick up what you're saying, because
Speaker 1: it is frustrating what you're saying, and it would be
Speaker 1: like if you're vegan. Besides, people that have like some
Speaker 1: kind of major dietary reason they need to be vegan,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure happens if you meet, you're gonna die
Speaker 1: or something. I don't know, but normally I would guess
Speaker 1: like ninety percent whatever the hell of vegans are for
Speaker 1: ethical reasons. So they have come to a position where
Speaker 1: they're saying, like I believe it is wrong to consume meat. Well,
Speaker 1: say you have a give me another ethical infraction, do
Speaker 1: like I don't want to do like pedophiles. Well that's
Speaker 1: where I okay, I got it. Oh, no, go ahead.
Speaker 8: It is it's like your sexual yet sexual preference is
Speaker 8: is a perfect one. Like I am staunchly this way,
Speaker 8: but I happen to put things in my mouth that
Speaker 8: resemble this other thing. But don't confuse that because this
Speaker 8: is the way I am.
Speaker 1: Let's say you have a hog fetish cheepers, and you've
Speaker 1: recognized that that is just wrong. That is not a thing.
Speaker 1: That is not a thing you can be partaken in.
Speaker 1: But then you come home with a hog suit. You
Speaker 1: see where this is going.
Speaker 5: No, is that better?
Speaker 4: So this guy anyway, Hey, guys, this is Yiannis. I
Speaker 4: got a special request for you. You've heard me talk
Speaker 4: about it before, mentioning it again and asking again. But
Speaker 4: I'm asking for you guys to all help and pitch
Speaker 4: in to save that winter habitat in Vail, Colorado for
Speaker 4: the big horn sheep. That was a proposed development for
Speaker 4: employee housing, and there was a big to do there.
Speaker 4: And finally the town of Vales figured out a way
Speaker 4: to purchase the land from the company that was proposing
Speaker 4: to develop it. And now they're gonna save it and
Speaker 4: basically and turn it into a conservation. He's meant, and
Speaker 4: they're also going to conserve more land in that area,
Speaker 4: so it's actually a win win. It went from only
Speaker 4: being twenty acres to now it's going to be over
Speaker 4: one hundred acres of bighorn sheep habitat for the bighorn
Speaker 4: sheep that lived in the Gore Range. I was lucky
Speaker 4: enough to hunt there two years ago and killed a
Speaker 4: ram in there. I wanted to keep that secret, but
Speaker 4: this is a good reason to bring it out publicly.
Speaker 4: John Hayes Taxi Jeremy did a full amount of that sheep,
Speaker 4: and I'm gonna donate that sheep to the town of
Speaker 4: Vale and they're going to use it as a as
Speaker 4: a as a marker, as a memorial to this project
Speaker 4: to forever memorialize the people and the conservation organizations. They're
Speaker 4: gonna work hard to make this happen. So I'm super
Speaker 4: stoked to be a part of this, and I hope
Speaker 4: you can too. And remember, every little bit helps. They're
Speaker 4: looking they have to raise about three million dollars. That's right,
Speaker 4: you heard it right by October third. There's not a
Speaker 4: lot of time. Obviously, it's going to take some people
Speaker 4: with some big old bank accounts to kick down big.
Speaker 4: But like I said, every little bit helps. So if
Speaker 4: you just got a dollar or five or ten, I
Speaker 4: would appreciate it if you kick down towards this. If
Speaker 4: you're thinking, man, I'm not a Colorado big horn sheep hunter,
Speaker 4: look at it this way. If someone else draws their
Speaker 4: tag there, they might take away that tag that they
Speaker 4: were trying to hunt in Nevada. Or if you are
Speaker 4: a Colorado sheep hunter, if there's more sheep here, there's
Speaker 4: more tags there. Even though you might not hunt there,
Speaker 4: it might free up opportunities for you to hunt somewhere else. Okay,
Speaker 4: So it is a win win for everybody, even if
Speaker 4: you're not a hunter. This preserves wildlife, very cool wildlife
Speaker 4: in a very cool place. So if you want to
Speaker 4: help out, go to ww dot Veil Bighorn dot com
Speaker 4: slash ways to help and you'll find a link where
Speaker 4: you can donate. I think it actually takes you to
Speaker 4: the wild Sheet Foundation. They're the ones that are managing
Speaker 4: all these donations. And just make sure that you click
Speaker 4: on Veil Bighorn to make sure that your donation goes
Speaker 4: directly towards this project. So again www Dot Veil Bighorn
Speaker 4: dot com slash ways to help, and again for me
Speaker 4: and for the sheep of the Gore range, help them out.
Speaker 4: I appreciate it. Thank you, I really am.
Speaker 8: This guy thought the door was open for your uh yeah,
Speaker 8: and you gotta jump in on the vegan side of things.
Speaker 1: But oh, anything to add I'm cutting a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff up. But you got to get back to this guy.
Speaker 5: Uh you know, yeah, like we even with what you know,
Speaker 5: we we we. I actually wrote a little article about it.
Speaker 5: I was I was asked once in a panel. You know,
Speaker 5: you know, monk sausage is something that we make at
Speaker 5: a restaurant, and it's it's an old recipe. My father
Speaker 5: gave me, right, he passed it down and and you know,
Speaker 5: we it became really just kind of popular around Minneapolis
Speaker 5: and the way we make it, you know, And there
Speaker 5: was a panelas who you know who or somebody asked.
Speaker 1: Me, can you give us a brief descriptor a monk sausage? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it is uh our recipe we use. And
Speaker 5: the thing that Dad showed me was seventy percent shoulder, uh,
Speaker 5: thirty belly. And then the aromatics inside is lemongrass, ginger, garlic, shallots, fish, sauce, tie, chilies.
Speaker 5: And then and then it's very important because the grind
Speaker 5: is coarse. It's not a lot of people they do sausage.
Speaker 5: They're more like Eastern European style, where it's you know,
Speaker 5: you kind of get a multified Ours is more course
Speaker 5: because because of the fat content so high that you
Speaker 5: actually want that fat to render. And while you're grilling it,
Speaker 5: you're not grilling at hot, you're kind of grilling at higher,
Speaker 5: so it renders. Now yeah, you know, you know, you
Speaker 5: know what I'm talking about renders. And and as it does.
Speaker 1: That, you say you're not grilling it hot, you're grilling
Speaker 1: it lower.
Speaker 5: Yep. Sorry, So what I meant high was like higher
Speaker 5: on the grill. Yeah, yeah, you know, And and and
Speaker 5: you kind of let it go. And and you know,
Speaker 5: I teach my a lot of our chefs and cooks
Speaker 5: who cook with us, they aren't a lot of them
Speaker 5: aren't munk. So I have the re like like re
Speaker 5: engineer their mind to be like, no, we're not cooking this,
Speaker 5: like if it was an Eastern European style, you know,
Speaker 5: sausage is the Southeast Asian sausage is a little different. Anyways,
Speaker 5: there was a lady asked and said, hey, you know,
Speaker 5: would you ever can you know, She's like, I'm vegan,
Speaker 5: can you make this sausage vegan? And I and I
Speaker 5: I politely said to her no, because.
Speaker 1: Because you realize this is one hundred percent made out
Speaker 1: of like we got seventy.
Speaker 5: This yeah, so yeah, absolutely, But I wasn't trying to
Speaker 5: be meaner. But then I also said to her too,
Speaker 5: that there's a legacy that comes along with this. See,
Speaker 5: my father when he came to this country, he didn't
Speaker 5: have anything, you know, he didn't have land, he didn't
Speaker 5: have anything his name. But what he did was he
Speaker 5: knew how to do this, and then he passed it
Speaker 5: to me, you know, And it was one of those
Speaker 5: things that as kids we learned how to do it
Speaker 5: with him. And and for me, it's more than just
Speaker 5: some recipe where I could just change it to people's preference.
Speaker 5: It's like, no, we're we're gonna stick to this, you know.
Speaker 5: And and so for me, it's it runs deeper in that.
Speaker 5: And it to me, like there's sometimes food and I'm
Speaker 5: a food guy, it runs deeper than that, you know,
Speaker 5: just say oh, hey, like let's make this vegan ruben
Speaker 5: whatever you know, and it's like yeah, but I we
Speaker 5: always say with her on our restaurant is if if
Speaker 5: when you eat something, be curious about it, like why
Speaker 5: is it the way it is? And so that's where
Speaker 5: I come from, especially with this whole like changing it
Speaker 5: this way, changing it this way, And so that was
Speaker 5: like my big thing. And then a lot of the
Speaker 5: vegans got mad at me. And then you know, when
Speaker 5: this article came out and they were like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 5: like you you hate vegans, and I'm like, I never
Speaker 5: said I hate vegans. I have you know, It's like
Speaker 5: I never said that. I said that we choose to
Speaker 5: make this this way and keep it this way when
Speaker 5: we have people who aren't pork eaters, and they're like, well,
Speaker 5: could you do it with chicken, I'm like, doesn't taste
Speaker 5: the same, you know it. And to me why it's
Speaker 5: so important to me was that this is part of
Speaker 5: Dad's legacy. See, my father didn't have this, like he's
Speaker 5: not like my parents don't have this thing with was like,
Speaker 5: this is this land and we're gonna give this to
Speaker 5: you when we pass away. No he didn't, but he
Speaker 5: had these recipes. It's his legacy. Yeah, and it's like
Speaker 5: we get to carry it and we get to pass
Speaker 5: it down and so you know, yeah, we could probably
Speaker 5: talk about this forever, but just this idea of like
Speaker 5: what it means to me, mung is to carry down
Speaker 5: these legacy, to carry down this you know, these things
Speaker 5: that it's not written in a document anywhere, you know,
Speaker 5: but we carried down from our parents and they took
Speaker 5: it from their parents. And so for me, when it
Speaker 5: became a vegan issue, I was just like, hey, this
Speaker 5: is this is where I'm at. And then everyone just
Speaker 5: you know, everyone on the.
Speaker 8: Such a god ball thing, right, It's it's like really
Speaker 8: an inappropriate question. It's like can you take that very
Speaker 8: unique and special thing to you and then completely change
Speaker 8: it for my personal.
Speaker 5: Taste yeah, and that's I mean again.
Speaker 1: Can you leave, man, I don't have any ill will
Speaker 1: toward vegan I don't. Yeah, I like to laugh about it.
Speaker 5: Yeah. But then like even with the you know, the
Speaker 5: article you're talking about, I'm like, I'm I'm firmly I
Speaker 5: believe the way that you believe where it's like, you know,
Speaker 5: like everyone like, if we're going to stand for like
Speaker 5: the first time, I'm right, you know, if if we're
Speaker 5: going to stand for that other side, we gotta know
Speaker 5: we got to keep it consistent. We got to keep
Speaker 5: it consistent, you know. And that's how I believe that
Speaker 5: was Like, bro, go find another place to live. You know.
Speaker 1: Well, let me tell you this dude's situation. He moves
Speaker 1: to his neighborhood and they find out that he uh hunts,
Speaker 1: and they start leaving them letters.
Speaker 5: Oh boy, even to.
Speaker 1: This point, this is I'm taking his word for it here.
Speaker 1: I don't know. This is what he said. He said.
Speaker 1: He gets a letter that says this community is vegetarian
Speaker 1: and doesn't greet with your hunting presence or the presence
Speaker 1: of murdered meat in the neighborhood.
Speaker 5: I'd love to know the size of the neighborhood. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh, he's wondering what would you do to keep the neighborhood,
Speaker 1: to keep things in the neighborhood's civil?
Speaker 6: Man, I just can confuse if he's a hunter and
Speaker 6: stuff and why he's living there? Was that, Like, how
Speaker 6: would you know?
Speaker 5: I mean, if it's a vegetarian neighborhood. I mean you
Speaker 5: think they'd have a sign.
Speaker 6: Was it in the contract? You sign a renter's agreement.
Speaker 6: If he's not in the contract.
Speaker 5: Meat, I agree with you. Yeah, if the landlord made
Speaker 5: it very clearly.
Speaker 1: No, No, this dude, I don't think this is that different,
Speaker 1: pointing out that that just happens to me where he lives.
Speaker 1: Oh it was so he got a letter from a
Speaker 1: neighbor saying that aut out the neighborhood. This is not
Speaker 1: a formal thing. Oh yeah, So I think he's just
Speaker 1: saying so outside of any rule break, and he's wondering,
Speaker 1: how do you maintain stability.
Speaker 5: I would invite them all over for a barbecue.
Speaker 1: That's not gonna work.
Speaker 5: Meat diplomacy.
Speaker 1: You could have him over for a veggie barbecue and
Speaker 1: then after say hey, let's let's chat because there's a
Speaker 1: little problem.
Speaker 4: I would just chat if you want to try it.
Speaker 4: I have some of this freshly killed venison over here
Speaker 4: that's pretty tasty. That ate nothing but plants.
Speaker 5: I eat a lot of grilled zucchini this time of
Speaker 5: year on the barbeque. That's good stuff. You know.
Speaker 1: Just let me tell you what I think. Then I
Speaker 1: want you to say what you think. They'll be the
Speaker 1: final word. I think that he should go about his business,
Speaker 1: but just don't don't rub their noses in it, like
Speaker 1: you know, I.
Speaker 5: Mean, don't you.
Speaker 1: Hang you here in your backyard just as well as
Speaker 1: you can hang in your front yard. Hang in the backyard.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm I would.
Speaker 1: I don't know I would.
Speaker 6: If he's getting all this these letters and stuff, there's
Speaker 6: there's not much he can do about it other than
Speaker 6: maybe talk to I would probably talk to the landlord
Speaker 6: and try and have a nice civil conversation, even though
Speaker 6: they might not understand that they make the choices that
Speaker 6: they do for reasons.
Speaker 5: I had anything to do with the landlord. There's nothing
Speaker 5: about renting. This is just his.
Speaker 1: Neighbors hostile to These people are not going to be
Speaker 1: appeased until he quits hunting.
Speaker 6: Okay, well then, yeah, just keep to yourself or the
Speaker 6: people that are sending you the letters, because you know
Speaker 6: how I don't know how many people are sending him
Speaker 6: letters and stuff. Maybe just literally try and have a
Speaker 6: civil conversation with them and be like you guys, make
Speaker 6: the choices that you make for reasons that you stand by,
Speaker 6: and you know, please let me make the choices that
Speaker 6: I stand by, and you know I won't shove it
Speaker 6: in your face. I won't be roasting a pig in
Speaker 6: my front yard. I'll cook it.
Speaker 5: I'd put a chunk of bloody hide maybe in their mailbox.
Speaker 5: That is a phenomenal movie.
Speaker 6: Try and keep it to yourself.
Speaker 8: The kill them with kindness. I'm a big like you
Speaker 8: can just grind people down with kindness and you kind
Speaker 8: of get satisfaction out of it because you know, it's
Speaker 8: just like irksome. But they can't say anything, they can't respond.
Speaker 6: They'll even get send more letters.
Speaker 8: But I had the impression that when I was living
Speaker 8: in and catch them, the neighbors across the street from
Speaker 8: me did not like me for whatever reason, no idea,
Speaker 8: And I was always cordial and uh, you know, would
Speaker 8: wave when they pull in or whatever. But kind of
Speaker 8: a wide street it's not like it was forced interaction
Speaker 8: at all.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 8: And one day I look out the window and I
Speaker 8: was always out and about working on the place, running
Speaker 8: a chop saw in the front yard and stuff like that,
Speaker 8: but not like would be like normal business hours, not
Speaker 8: crazy early or crazy late. One day I look across
Speaker 8: the street and here's mom, dad, the two kids, a
Speaker 8: dog like little nuclear family, and they have a brand
Speaker 8: new refrigerator in the box in the back of this
Speaker 8: guy's pickup and they're trying to negotiate this thing out
Speaker 8: and it's not going well. And so I drop what
Speaker 8: I what I'm doing, run across the street. I'm like, hey,
Speaker 8: can I help you?
Speaker 5: And they're like, eah no. And I was.
Speaker 8: Like, ah, you really look like can I just help
Speaker 8: and kind of force the issue a little bit in
Speaker 8: you know, fifteen seconds had the refrigerator out safely. Now
Speaker 8: it's on the ground, they have a dolly. I'm like,
Speaker 8: I can help you get inside, and they're like nope,
Speaker 8: and literally never spoke to me from that day forward.
Speaker 5: Really, yeah, just bizarre. Some people are just that way.
Speaker 1: Couldn't kill them with kindness.
Speaker 8: Yeah, The moral of the story is, some people are
Speaker 8: just that way. Right, It's like doesn't matter what you do.
Speaker 8: So I wouldn't go out of my way to change
Speaker 8: my life. But you know they're miserable inside their house
Speaker 8: writing letters and you gotta understand that too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I've I've learned too, man, like hurt people
Speaker 5: hurt people. You know, like people that are hurt, they
Speaker 5: hurt people because it's like you have all this bs
Speaker 5: inside of you and you got to project it somewhere.
Speaker 5: And then being hurt sometimes, like they hurt people. And
Speaker 5: that's where I mean, I've I've learned that in my
Speaker 5: lifetime is hurt people hurt people. And sometimes that's like
Speaker 5: the final answer, and I'm like, yeah, that's it, you know,
Speaker 5: that's there's nothing else, nothing you're gonna do. Yeah, nothing
Speaker 5: you can do about it until you know, they get
Speaker 5: help or until they you know, recognize that hurt or
Speaker 5: until they you know, confront that hurt. You know.
Speaker 1: Uh, can y'all can you tell me how your name
Speaker 1: changed over time?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So the name given to me at birth was Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you actually can have two years in the studio.
Speaker 2: The story is I was very sick and then the
Speaker 2: moon culture. You know, sometimes they you know, there's there's
Speaker 2: a lot to do with the namesake. And so in
Speaker 2: the Moon culture, sometimes when you just don't get better,
Speaker 2: they change your name oh to you and and they'll
Speaker 2: they'll say, do you know.
Speaker 1: What was the I mean, did you have a specific
Speaker 1: ailment or you just weren't thriving?
Speaker 2: Now they just said, I was just sick all the time.
Speaker 2: And so you know, one one of the first I
Speaker 2: guess you could sell. You could say it in remedy.
Speaker 2: They'll maybe consult with the shaman. And then a lot
Speaker 2: of times they'll just say, hey, maybe you just need
Speaker 2: to change his name. And actually, in this case, my
Speaker 2: parents gave me to my aunt uncle and my uncle
Speaker 2: was the deacon of the Catholic.
Speaker 5: Church, and so they gave me to go live with
Speaker 5: my aunt uncle.
Speaker 1: And because you weren't doing well, because.
Speaker 2: I wasn't doing well, and so I want to say,
Speaker 2: this is when I was just a few months old
Speaker 2: even and so he since he was a Catholic, a
Speaker 2: deacon Catholic church, he uh the translated there's a translated
Speaker 2: Bible in mung So and in the in there John
Speaker 2: the Baptist. Uh the name translated in mung is jah.
Speaker 2: So I shared this when I was here the first time,
Speaker 2: my name is my name is Jah and Mun and
Speaker 2: so he named me after John, renamed me John the Baptist. Uh,
Speaker 2: my name after John Baptist in the mung translated version
Speaker 2: of the Bible. And I got better and then he
Speaker 2: gave me they gave me.
Speaker 5: Back to my parents, so and so yeah, so in
Speaker 5: our culture it's animism, right, So it's the belief of,
Speaker 5: you know, the the ancestors of the are the good
Speaker 5: spirits and their evil spirits. So when yeah, I was young,
Speaker 5: I I you know, this is from what I've learned.
Speaker 5: I bet you it was probably like, Okay, we're going
Speaker 5: to change his name because we're going to attract to
Speaker 5: trick the evil spirits who's making him sick to think
Speaker 5: that it's a different person. So that's the changing of
Speaker 5: the name. And so I have friends who have had
Speaker 5: name changes and stuff like that. And then even even
Speaker 5: that whole idea of like the like what the name
Speaker 5: carries along with it in the meaning. And so my
Speaker 5: name yeah, which you know, yeah, I used to be yea.
Speaker 5: It literally translates to iron skillet or fry. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So as you go into it, and I dude, I
Speaker 5: hated it.
Speaker 1: Growing up, man, are you kidding me?
Speaker 5: It is strong. I think you might think it's cool,
Speaker 5: but not when you were seven years old and you're
Speaker 5: with all your cousins then like hey, where's the yea
Speaker 5: And then they'll be like no him, like no, not him,
Speaker 5: like you know, you made got made fun of.
Speaker 1: It's not a common name.
Speaker 5: Oh no, not not really. It's how many years do
Speaker 5: you guys know? Not a few one here. But but
Speaker 5: here's the deal. My youngest brother's name is which means
Speaker 5: blessing of God literal translationist blessing of God. So we
Speaker 5: have no question. We can absolutely so we have. So
Speaker 5: we have like you know, like a like a pan,
Speaker 5: an iron skiller, and then we have blessing of God.
Speaker 1: You know it's like, dude, come on, we know how okay,
Speaker 1: how how directly does that mean iron skillet?
Speaker 5: It's literal little like yah means the iron skiller or
Speaker 5: the walk or the you know, the pan, the frying pan. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I hated it growing up.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, can I tell you them?
Speaker 5: When I got my citizens, I.
Speaker 1: Got one more question about about the name, just to
Speaker 1: make sure I was talking about being out on book tour.
Speaker 1: When I was on a book tour, I met a
Speaker 1: kid and his name was Talon, which that was a
Speaker 1: great name. His name's town. So clearly it's a you know,
Speaker 1: the foot of a predatory bird. But it's a name.
Speaker 1: So when I hear Talent, because it's not a common name,
Speaker 1: I make the thing that like, oh, that name means
Speaker 1: a raptor's claw. If I meet an Autumn, I'm like,
Speaker 1: autumn is a name. But if she were to go
Speaker 1: to another country and they speak a different language and
Speaker 1: people are like, what does your name mean? And she
Speaker 1: would say, well, my name, my name's autumn. It means
Speaker 1: the season between summer and winter. That might seem noteworthy
Speaker 1: to someone, But then this autumn would be obligated to say.
Speaker 1: But it's so common, no one thinks of it that
Speaker 1: way because it's so integrated into naming. So if your
Speaker 1: name's iron skillet, it's enough that people like, hold on
Speaker 1: your name's iron skillet, or is it so integrated that
Speaker 1: it's not noteworthy?
Speaker 5: So so the little translation is iron skillet, you know,
Speaker 5: or walk or whatever, you know, an iron skillet, iron pan.
Speaker 5: But my mom said, the metaphorical name represents like like
Speaker 5: an an iron skiller pan is uh, it's uh, it's
Speaker 5: a vessel you use to cook with. And she said
Speaker 5: that what she said to me was that it means
Speaker 5: that like you will be a servant of men, like
Speaker 5: in a good way, like not in a you know
Speaker 5: what I mean, like like to serve or to help,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 5: But yeah, but then I'm like, dude, he got blessing
Speaker 5: of God. You know, it literally means blessing of God,
Speaker 5: you know. But nah, man, it's it's one of those things. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean he's I love my little his name again,
Speaker 5: hon or, Yeah, go home?
Speaker 1: What what what does American bodies call him?
Speaker 5: So it's spelled kob mob that's the monk spelling. So
Speaker 5: growing up they just called him coub kob. So he's
Speaker 5: called Kube or kooby. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So and to pronounce his name again for me.
Speaker 5: And it's or sometimes we just say moan.
Speaker 1: So how how would how would how does how would
Speaker 1: a native speaker say your name? Very similar to what
Speaker 1: we're saying?
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, you would? I get my name butchered all
Speaker 5: the time. So when I got my citizenship, they asked
Speaker 5: the last question to ask you is would you like
Speaker 5: to have a new name because you can take on
Speaker 5: like an American name, uh the immigration officer. Yeah, seriously,
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, you can get it, dude. I had in college.
Speaker 5: I had a list of like what names and all
Speaker 5: my buddies can pick, you know, And it was like I
Speaker 5: literally when he when she said this, and I was
Speaker 5: sitting in the office with her, I almost want to
Speaker 5: be like Optimist Prime, please call me. That would be myself,
Speaker 5: that would be my government name, Optimist Prime.
Speaker 10: Thang, can you imagine getting like credit card statements from
Speaker 10: Optimist Prime, you know, like, dude that or Chad, yeah,
Speaker 10: location he pays, Like, hey mx Oultimate is prime here?
Speaker 5: Yeah, do you know what I could do to this place?
Speaker 5: Oh dude, I know it was that or it was
Speaker 5: like chatter Trevor. I joked. I always joked about that,
Speaker 5: you know, just get a good white name, a good strong.
Speaker 1: Did you know did you know people? Well, first off,
Speaker 1: how old were you?
Speaker 5: Oh, when I got a citizenship was like two years ago,
Speaker 5: three years ago? Yeah, it was pretty recent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: I just kind of waited.
Speaker 1: You know, you only became a US citizen two or
Speaker 1: three years ago?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, what year did you move to the US?
Speaker 5: Eighty eight? So it was.
Speaker 1: It was a lot what ages you moved to the US.
Speaker 5: I was four and a half five, so started kindergarten
Speaker 5: right away.
Speaker 1: So give me the base chronology where and when you
Speaker 1: were born. Yeah, it's the flow because I know you
Speaker 1: mentioned the refugee camp.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so my parents met in bonvina I, which is
Speaker 5: a very you know, famous, big refuge It's the largest
Speaker 5: refugee camp northern Thailand. It's like ten kilometers off the
Speaker 5: borders of a Louse in Thailand. That's where a lot
Speaker 5: among people came to after the war.
Speaker 6: That's where my dad spent peace corps there for four
Speaker 6: years teaching small engines.
Speaker 1: One stuff.
Speaker 5: What year, I mean, what are the years? Do you know?
Speaker 6: A while ago?
Speaker 5: Like what year was he there?
Speaker 6: Like, you know, I'm not sure, but it was it
Speaker 6: was wild, like probably like.
Speaker 1: Howl shooting attacks Chester maybe they.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And actually I think Yea's family and my family
Speaker 2: overlapped in the in the camp.
Speaker 5: When did you guys leave? We left in eighty okay, yeah,
Speaker 5: we left in eighty eight. Yeah, my dad had a
Speaker 5: chance to leave early, but then he stayed because my
Speaker 5: dad fought in the war, and you know, and it's
Speaker 5: man just to hear their stories of what they did
Speaker 5: running missions for the CIA in US government, you know,
Speaker 5: Northern last there.
Speaker 1: Y'all sent me. Y'all sent me a great book about
Speaker 1: all those campaigns.
Speaker 5: What was that book called, y'all Tragic Tragic Mountains, A
Speaker 5: good one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he sent me the details all those campaigns.
Speaker 5: And he goes back and for the history too, like
Speaker 5: you know, you know, fighting with the French back in
Speaker 5: the day and just like you know, back. But yeah,
Speaker 5: it was a good book. Eighty eight we left. We
Speaker 5: landed in Saint Paul, Minnesota, so yeah, and came there
Speaker 5: and then we moved out.
Speaker 1: To like your own back up on your folks met
Speaker 1: as refugees.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So my dad fought in the war. He escaped,
Speaker 5: my mom. They escaped. They had a horrible time. They
Speaker 5: got caught, were put in prison camps by the communists.
Speaker 5: Finally escaped that and then in seventy seven they met
Speaker 5: in the camp and then in seventy eight they got
Speaker 5: married and then they were there until eighty eight, So
Speaker 5: ten years they.
Speaker 1: Were there, ten years in the camp.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because they were because the moment, people were stuck,
Speaker 5: because the Americans didn't want them, because They're like, I
Speaker 5: don't know, it's the Thai government was like, dude, we
Speaker 5: don't like we're borders with Laos and Laos doesn't like
Speaker 5: you guys, so we don't want to you know. So
Speaker 5: literally it was this really awkward like even among people
Speaker 5: that were born in the camp at that time, where
Speaker 5: they weren't they're not. I'm not considered a citizen of Thailand,
Speaker 5: you know, because but I was born in Thailand, so
Speaker 5: I am.
Speaker 1: But your family came from your parents were loud born, yep,
Speaker 1: but they don't hold I mean, there's no citizenship for them.
Speaker 5: For do you have a second citizenship somewhere? No? No, no.
Speaker 5: I was just kind of you're.
Speaker 1: Like a citizenless person, a citizenshipless person. Yeah.
Speaker 5: But you know, but one of the crazy things is
Speaker 5: like when I got my citizenship, a buddy of mine
Speaker 5: who you know, his friend, came to me. It is
Speaker 5: a couple of years ago, and he said, hey, why
Speaker 5: would you want to be a citizen of America? Like
Speaker 5: right now, like America, like things weren't you know, I
Speaker 5: mean this is after, you know, like things aren't going
Speaker 5: too hot for America. Why would you want to be
Speaker 5: a citizen in America, and I'm like, bro, you were
Speaker 5: born here. You know, you became a citizen when you
Speaker 5: were born here, like my grandparents and my parents fought
Speaker 5: a war to get me here. It's a little I
Speaker 5: feel like it was a little different for me, you know,
Speaker 5: like I always talk about I was talking about this
Speaker 5: scene from Saving Private Ryan. You know at the end
Speaker 5: when uh, you know Tom Hanks character Captain Miller, you know,
Speaker 5: he's dying and he looks at uh.
Speaker 1: Tom dies in the end of Saving Private Yeah.
Speaker 5: Spoiler, Like, come on, you know what I'm talking about, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's like slow bleedout.
Speaker 1: I know that movie really devolved. Like it starts out
Speaker 1: like all this grand Dday and then there's that they
Speaker 1: have that you know, it kind of centers in on
Speaker 1: that really bad german.
Speaker 5: It's like a clock winding down. Yeah. And then at
Speaker 5: the end, in the end, yeah, at the end, well
Speaker 5: remember because they all died finding Private Ryan, right, and
Speaker 5: and he whispers Captain Miller to prior. Ryan whispers and says,
Speaker 5: earn this earned this. And then you know, and then
Speaker 5: it goes into like the present and he's you know,
Speaker 5: he's this old guy now that he's standing over Captain
Speaker 5: Miller's grave and he looks at his wife and he's
Speaker 5: an old grandpa and goes, did I live a good life?
Speaker 5: You know? And I I tell people.
Speaker 1: So Tom Hanks meaning earned the sacrifice that was made.
Speaker 5: Absolutely and and that to me, that's a it's a
Speaker 5: good haunting I have that. When I got my citizenship,
Speaker 5: I was I thought about my grandpa. I never met
Speaker 5: my dad's dad who died in this war, and the
Speaker 5: sacrifices they made, and all my some of my uncles
Speaker 5: who have passed away in the war to get us
Speaker 5: here right. So I've learned that freedom isn't free. Like
Speaker 5: you might not have paid for it, but somebody did.
Speaker 5: And that's and and and even understanding like like themong
Speaker 5: like are like some of our dads and our grandpas
Speaker 5: who fought for America before they even were given the
Speaker 5: ability to step foot in America. So they fought for
Speaker 5: a country that later on denied them. And I, to me,
Speaker 5: that's true patriotm That's where I think, like man like,
Speaker 5: that's what really wrapped in my head as I got older,
Speaker 5: I'm like, I want to be a citizen because there
Speaker 5: comes a point for me where I'm like what am
Speaker 5: I doing with the sacrifice that was done for me?
Speaker 5: And that's why it was really important for me to
Speaker 5: go through that process to become a citizen and to
Speaker 5: be able to talk about it and to honor them,
Speaker 5: to honor their legacy, to honor who they are through
Speaker 5: and it's as simple as through the food we make
Speaker 5: and we get to talk about that. It's so cool.
Speaker 5: We get to travel the country. I get to do
Speaker 5: shows and talk about the legacies of you know, my father,
Speaker 5: my grandfather by the sacrifices they made for this country.
Speaker 5: And I get to talk about that by cooking mung food.
Speaker 5: And so that's why one of the things I get
Speaker 5: really excited about.
Speaker 1: You know, I want to get back into a little
Speaker 1: bit of stuff from early in your life. But I know,
Speaker 1: I think that growing up in I grew up in Michigan,
Speaker 1: spent a lot of my life in Montana, a handful
Speaker 1: of other states as well. I know about among people
Speaker 1: through the lens of hunting. Yeah, it's like I feel
Speaker 1: like if I didn't if I didn't know all there's
Speaker 1: these uh, if I didn't know that there was these
Speaker 1: avid hunters in the US that came from laos as refugees,
Speaker 1: like I wouldn't know about Mung culture. I know it
Speaker 1: through the hunting lens. If you're a Mung chef and
Speaker 1: you're bringing a cuisine around, I have to imagine that
Speaker 1: at times you need to go. Before we get to
Speaker 1: the food, let me explain that we exist. Meaning everyone
Speaker 1: holds in their head like all Americans hold in their
Speaker 1: head like, oh Max food. Yeah, it's this country to
Speaker 1: the south of US. They speak Spanish. I got the
Speaker 1: basic gist. But to say to most people Mung food, well,
Speaker 1: I mean most I would say, the majority of people
Speaker 1: aren't gonna know what the hell you're talking about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, true or not true? Completely true. So you know,
Speaker 5: if you know, I get some craft from I call
Speaker 5: them hardliner among people, They're like, you aren't making real
Speaker 5: Munk food. It's blah blah blah blah. You're bastarizing your food.
Speaker 5: You make money, they do that.
Speaker 1: Oh dude, yeah, that's not that you're not suffering that.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, yeah, yeah, every every you know, every culture
Speaker 5: has that right your own people kind of like you know.
Speaker 5: So one of the things I say within our restaurant,
Speaker 5: we have this mantra we always say, we say every
Speaker 5: dish has a narrative. If you follow that dish long
Speaker 5: enough and close enough, you get to the people behind
Speaker 5: the food. And once you're there, it's actually not about food.
Speaker 5: It's about people. That food is a catalyst into cultivating
Speaker 5: great relationships. So that's why I ask people. Every time
Speaker 5: you eat a food and you go, hey, I want
Speaker 5: to change it or it should be changed this way,
Speaker 5: you know how we were talking about, I always go, hey,
Speaker 5: ask yourself why it was made like that? Because if
Speaker 5: you follow the story, you follow those crumbs, I bet
Speaker 5: you, you get to the people and once you get there,
Speaker 5: you get to know their story, and then it opens
Speaker 5: your eyes of saying, this is why the food is
Speaker 5: done this way, you know. And So I grew up
Speaker 5: not wanting to cook munk food. I didn't want to
Speaker 5: be a cook at all. Dude, I went to school
Speaker 5: for all this stuff. Like I graduated college with a
Speaker 5: degree in interpersonal communication and minor in PR and marketing.
Speaker 5: Like I wanted to run as far as I could.
Speaker 1: From what does interpersonal communication?
Speaker 5: So you work with a lot of it's kind of
Speaker 5: one on one from when you majoring that you can
Speaker 5: go to grad school, you can do you can teach
Speaker 5: it and then you can work like doing counseling, you know, counseling,
Speaker 5: you know, therapy, you can do all that, you know
Speaker 5: after that.
Speaker 1: But you were raised eating mung food.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, dude, Like yeah, like that that was it.
Speaker 5: That's what mom knew how to cook, and that's what
Speaker 5: we ate and it was incredible. But yeah, but at
Speaker 5: the end of the thay too. I'm a Wisconsin boy, right,
Speaker 5: So Culver's you know, double cheeseburger, but burger from Culvers,
Speaker 5: come on, man, like, you know, like cheese curs. I
Speaker 5: am mad at dan, you know, you know.
Speaker 6: So, yeah makes what's that saying? Makes butterburger better?
Speaker 5: Like yeah, better brand of beef.
Speaker 6: Better brand of beef, makes a butter burger better.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So like growing up, it was like, yeah, do
Speaker 5: you like munk food or do you like American food?
Speaker 5: Or the mong word for American is mika. Like do
Speaker 5: you like meeka food or like American food? I'm like yes,
Speaker 5: like I could like both. Right, What's I means mung
Speaker 5: It's it's the it's the long way of saying American.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I thought it was like an abbreviate.
Speaker 2: It's like a shortened version.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so so so our parents couldn't say American,
Speaker 5: you know, but in their accident of alliteration, it came
Speaker 5: out mika. So so when so when you're around among
Speaker 5: people and you hear they're probably talking about you, guys, honest?
Speaker 1: So when when?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 1: Okay? I was want to understand the relationship to mung
Speaker 1: food and American food for a prior generation. So your
Speaker 1: parents had long history and their home country. Were they
Speaker 1: when you were kid and you guys went out If
Speaker 1: kids are like, hey, I go to McDonald's, did they
Speaker 1: embrace that or were they reluctant to get into that
Speaker 1: because it would mean that it would take you down
Speaker 1: this path of moving away from mung food, moving away
Speaker 1: from mung culture or were they like down with America
Speaker 1: not down like yeah yeah yeah yeah that comes out wrong.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Did they embrace sort of like fast food culture or
Speaker 1: did they resist it because it would be a forfeiture
Speaker 1: of culture? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I mean I think my parents it was survival. It
Speaker 5: wasn't like hey, like so right, now I get this
Speaker 5: great opportunity to talk about the in depth understanding of
Speaker 5: mung food and whatever it represents. My parents grown up
Speaker 5: it was like, how do we work our job that
Speaker 5: we're getting paid eight bucks an hour? And how do
Speaker 5: we provide for our family? So it wasn't like they
Speaker 5: had this moment of like, oh, like, let me think
Speaker 5: about how our food can influence the way that our
Speaker 5: kids think about our culture. No, it was like what
Speaker 5: can we scrounge around to survive? So sometimes if it's
Speaker 5: a buck nine nine happy meal at McDonald's back in
Speaker 5: the day when it was bucket nine, and I remember that, boys, uh,
Speaker 5: you know, like then that was it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: Some days, you know, you know, some days it's like
Speaker 5: if some noodle dish, some blinklot dish or whatever, you know,
Speaker 5: like and then they had to make it work with
Speaker 5: the and with the garden and they just pull stuff
Speaker 5: from the vegetables from the garden. Then that was it,
Speaker 5: you know. But what what I get to do is
Speaker 5: I get to look back on those moments because I
Speaker 5: have the privilege now to look back and think about that.
Speaker 5: I have the privilege to dissect and break down the
Speaker 5: thoughts of like how this what this food represents for
Speaker 5: our people because they sacrifice and they worked so hard
Speaker 5: for for me, you know, and so yeah, I don't
Speaker 5: think that, you know, because I think that we do
Speaker 5: a lot of shows and stuff like that, and I
Speaker 5: think that they are editors and you know, producers who
Speaker 5: want to give me this like this like beautiful like
Speaker 5: and you know Netflix Chef's table kind of like you
Speaker 5: stood there with your mom and you guys made sticky
Speaker 5: rice together. I'm like, dude, it wasn't like that, you know,
Speaker 5: like there's not that you know what I'm saying, where
Speaker 5: it's like all chef has is like beautiful story of
Speaker 5: like sitting with grandma. She's teaching you how to make whatever.
Speaker 5: It's like no, man like they were hustling all the time,
Speaker 5: Like you know, we ate instant ramen, you know, we
Speaker 5: ate you know, I learned how to cook fried eggs
Speaker 5: with tomatoes, you know, and stuff like that. Those are
Speaker 5: the things we did. There's nothing sexy about it. It
Speaker 5: was tough. We lived on food stamps, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: and it was like but like man like to me,
Speaker 5: I feel so blessed to be in a position where
Speaker 5: I am, where we get to interact with people who
Speaker 5: value food at a very high economic level, you know,
Speaker 5: where it's like they're willing to pay a lot of
Speaker 5: money for food, and we also get to tell this
Speaker 5: incredible story that comes along with it.
Speaker 1: You know, did your folks raise food when you're growing up?
Speaker 1: You talk about having.
Speaker 5: Guard Yeah, man, you know you understanding among people. We
Speaker 5: so right now, my parents, you know, they're in their seventies,
Speaker 5: they're retired. They have a ten acre farm, right she
Speaker 5: my mom calls it a little garden, but it's ten
Speaker 5: acres and everything they grow every year they harvest it
Speaker 5: and bring over to the restaurant. So yeah, and that's
Speaker 5: what it is. Oh dude, Yeah, So.
Speaker 1: Your restaurant serves food at your folks raise.
Speaker 5: Oh absolutely, that's the whole point of the restaurant. Like
Speaker 5: you know, like what you know, we just got done
Speaker 5: with the state fair, you know. So so in Minnesota
Speaker 5: state fair is huge. It's like this year they had
Speaker 5: one point eight million people walk through in twelve days. Right.
Speaker 5: And so my mom makes these gallipau where there are
Speaker 5: these steam buns. Right. So she makes these steam by
Speaker 5: as a family tradition. And this year we sold a
Speaker 5: little bit over twenty three thousand of them. And so
Speaker 5: my mom and my aunt and three church four church
Speaker 5: ladies made twenty three thousand of these you know, steam buns,
Speaker 5: and that's I mean, that's my mom has this thing
Speaker 5: where she says, I don't know business, I don't know math,
Speaker 5: but my hands have been taking care of you for
Speaker 5: the last almost forty years until the day I die.
Speaker 5: I will always take care of you. If my hands
Speaker 5: can make it and I can produce it, I will
Speaker 5: do it for you, you know. And so it's like
Speaker 5: when you.
Speaker 1: Hear stuff like that, Mom, Bro, when.
Speaker 5: You hear stuff like that, how huge not not keep
Speaker 5: talking about them? You know, And so like I get
Speaker 5: super emotional about it. But like, man, it's like, no quit.
Speaker 5: She's in her seventies, no quit. She's out working half
Speaker 5: our chefs, you know. And I love it. And it's
Speaker 5: not something where I asked her to, but she's just like,
Speaker 5: this is what we do. This is how we help
Speaker 5: each other. This is what we do. And that's what
Speaker 5: I love about our culture. You know, there's no quit.
Speaker 5: It is if we come together, we can you know,
Speaker 5: we can accomplish more. Dad told me that the Mung culture,
Speaker 5: in the Mung people, what happened was hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 5: of years ago. There's always this argument between the eighteen clans,
Speaker 5: right who is the rifle like clan name to to
Speaker 5: be to lead these people. Right, so it's like this fight,
Speaker 5: it's a game of Throne style, right, it's like what
Speaker 5: clan should be the you know, it is the direct
Speaker 5: line for the first Monk Empire. And you know they
Speaker 5: didn't argue about the plan.
Speaker 1: I'm a Vang Yeah yeah, you're Yangyanglan yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: And so it's like game of throne whatever it kind
Speaker 5: of deal and which plan is better? I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 5: everyone always yeah, but that's how it is. Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 5: cool from you got it, you win, you know. But
Speaker 5: but but what Dad said that during the war, during
Speaker 5: the genocide of our people, So you have to realize
Speaker 5: that in the Mountain of Laws, there's about three hundred
Speaker 5: thousand moongk people that live there. Through the genocide or
Speaker 5: the Mong people. After the war and nineteen seventy five
Speaker 5: there about fifty five thousand Mong people were killed, just slaughtered.
Speaker 5: So think about that fifty five thousand to sixty thousand
Speaker 5: Mong people killed and thirty it was about three hundred
Speaker 5: thousand people there. And he said he got so bad
Speaker 5: that the eighteen clans came together and said we can't
Speaker 5: fight anymore about which clan should be the number one.
Speaker 5: We have to unite, and if we don't unite, our
Speaker 5: children will never be free. They will live in war.
Speaker 5: And Dad said that they made this commitment, that eighteen
Speaker 5: clans made this commitment to each other, says no more
Speaker 5: will we fight. We have to come together. And you know,
Speaker 5: I always say that if you want to know our food,
Speaker 5: you have to know our story. Right, it is kind
Speaker 5: of what you were asking me. And I always say
Speaker 5: that our cultural DNA is intricately woven into the foods
Speaker 5: that we eat as Mung people. And I asked my
Speaker 5: mom what's the best way to describe Mong people to
Speaker 5: people who have are munk food to people who haven't
Speaker 5: eat Munk food before, And she said, balance, because you
Speaker 5: look at Mung food, we have four basic element always
Speaker 5: on the table. There's a rice, there's some kind of protein,
Speaker 5: there's a vegetable, and sometimes I have vegetables in a broth,
Speaker 5: and then there's a hot sauce. And she said, out
Speaker 5: of all those four elements on the table, one is
Speaker 5: never better than the other because we need all of
Speaker 5: them together to make this complete meal. So I always
Speaker 5: get asked, what's your favorite mung dish. I'm like, I
Speaker 5: can't talk about you know, the grilled pork that my
Speaker 5: dad taught me how to make the grill over a fire.
Speaker 5: I can't talk about that without talking about the sticky rice.
Speaker 5: We well, i can't talk about the sticky rice unless
Speaker 5: I'm talking about the whatsal, which is, you know, the
Speaker 5: pepper sauce and man, the mung mustard green we have that.
Speaker 5: You know that the mom girls in her garden has
Speaker 5: this bite that cuts through the porkiness and the fattiness
Speaker 5: of the pork, So you need that too. So I
Speaker 5: can't talk about one dish. It's all about a combination
Speaker 5: of one. And you know, in the last few years
Speaker 5: of me being able to do the show Fair Oh
Speaker 5: for Outdoor and being able to meet all these different people,
Speaker 5: I've really learned that the Mong mentality when it comes
Speaker 5: to life and food, it's basically conservationism. It is this
Speaker 5: idea that everything is on a balance, it's an ecosystem.
Speaker 5: If one thing goes wrong, like for example, like if
Speaker 5: the if the sticky rice, yeah yeah, I knows what
Speaker 5: I mean. If the sticky rice is not on the table,
Speaker 5: It's like you don't start eating, It's like, nah, and
Speaker 5: we need the rice there first.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have.
Speaker 5: We used to like we used to forget about putting
Speaker 5: the pepper, the hot sauce on there, and my mom
Speaker 5: would stop dinner and we would quickly make it and
Speaker 5: then put it on the dinner before it comes together.
Speaker 5: And it's this idea that this is, this is an ecosystem.
Speaker 5: Everything needs to work. And that's what I think about
Speaker 5: Monk's food. And when I talk about the philosophy of
Speaker 5: munk food, that's what I'm talking about, you know.
Speaker 1: So in the most in the most basic sentence level way, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how do you what would you say, like, what is
Speaker 1: mung food?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So I always say the munk food isn't a
Speaker 5: type of food. It's a philosophy of food, you know.
Speaker 5: And what is that philosophy. It's the philosophy that we
Speaker 5: live in a living world around us and using the
Speaker 5: living world around us to make food that nourishes our
Speaker 5: soul and brings our community together. And the great thing
Speaker 5: about munk food, and this is what I love, and
Speaker 5: I'll get pushed back from some of the hardliners, is
Speaker 5: that munk food is not it's represented of what regions
Speaker 5: we're in so we're scattered all around. Did you know
Speaker 5: that in nineteen eighty six hundred Mongk people resides in Missoula.
Speaker 5: They can't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they dominated the market.
Speaker 5: Absolutely because we are people of you know, the ground,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 1: But I feel like a French person that lives in
Speaker 1: the French countryside. If I said, like, what is traditional
Speaker 1: French food, they could say the sentence you just said, yep, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And so I said, there's got to be another way
Speaker 1: to describe mung food.
Speaker 5: Well, I what I what I talked about with munk
Speaker 5: food is that like, like our story is involved in its.
Speaker 5: So for example, my dad always said to me, no
Speaker 5: matter where you are in the world, wherever you go,
Speaker 5: if you find another monk person there, you always find family.
Speaker 5: So the kind of you know what we talked about
Speaker 5: in the beginning, right, like, yeah, if I like, I
Speaker 5: go to Idaho somewhere and I see another Munk family,
Speaker 5: I'm like, WHOA, what's up? You know? And but we
Speaker 5: share that same history, right, That's what happens when you
Speaker 5: have an you don't have a country of your own, right,
Speaker 5: And so I would say that if you want to
Speaker 5: talk about flavor profile our flavor is representative of Southeast Asia.
Speaker 5: So you know, you got you know, you got your
Speaker 5: lemon grass, you got your gingers, you got your you know, garlic,
Speaker 5: you know a lot a lot of you know, you're
Speaker 5: kind of like the weird cousin to like Loo Thai
Speaker 5: Vietnamese food. You know, you know a little bit of that.
Speaker 5: But I think that what if you really want to
Speaker 5: get to know munk food, you have to know the
Speaker 5: monk people regional because there's more people that live out
Speaker 5: in Fresno, California. There's people that live in Boco Raton,
Speaker 5: There's people that live in Low Rock, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: You know, So are you do you see manifestations of
Speaker 1: like where where those regions have bled into the culinary tradition? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: because the thing I want to ask you about is
Speaker 1: when your folks, like, because your folks grew up in proximity,
Speaker 1: no doubt, to raising food and sourcing food, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you wind up another continent. It mm hm,
Speaker 1: just just the climactic with gardening food that's available right. Uh,
Speaker 1: you had to they had to have been forced in
Speaker 1: some way to lean right, to lean into this whole
Speaker 1: new way of trying to achieve something that made sense
Speaker 1: to them, absolutely from an ingredient standpoint.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, And I love the fact that they did because
Speaker 5: it's about advancing our people, you know. So in April,
Speaker 5: I got a chance to go back to Laos and
Speaker 5: I actually I was with a production crew. We did this,
Speaker 5: you know, we filmed this Little Dock series. And I
Speaker 5: actually went to the village that my mom was born
Speaker 5: in Okay and and I found out that I have
Speaker 5: one hundred years of our our family lineage comes out
Speaker 5: of that village. And I went to the exact same spot.
Speaker 1: Are there still in that village?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They came back after the war?
Speaker 5: Ye oh yeah yeah. So so the Mong people couldn't escape.
Speaker 5: They just came back and lived in the mountains and
Speaker 5: they just kept quiet, you know. And so I'm I'm
Speaker 5: here in this village and I'm standing on the the
Speaker 5: village Bond I think I think it's Bond sound right now,
Speaker 5: because it didn't have a name, but it it The
Speaker 5: government named it with the there's like this little river
Speaker 5: that comes by it, and so they named him bon
Speaker 5: Bon and laosh and Lao it means village of you know.
Speaker 5: So Son is the name of the river. And and
Speaker 5: it's in the mountains. And when I say it's in
Speaker 5: the mountains, like you're in a car, you're in a
Speaker 5: four wheel drive car. You're driving through the treacherous mountain
Speaker 5: for about I don't know, you're about three four hours
Speaker 5: to get there. You know, there's nothing up there, you know,
Speaker 5: and there's a there's you know, people that live up there.
Speaker 5: And I remember standing on the plot of land where
Speaker 5: the house that my mom was born in the little kid, yeah, dude,
Speaker 5: And and and to find out that it was one
Speaker 5: hundred years like my great grandmother was a shaman in
Speaker 5: that village too, you know, so like it's like our
Speaker 5: families connected that village time.
Speaker 1: So your mom had to she had to explain like
Speaker 1: here there.
Speaker 5: No, my mom wasn't there with me. It was like
Speaker 5: another cousin of theirs that lived in in Pansavan and
Speaker 5: in Laos that kind of took me up there and says, hey,
Speaker 5: we found Yeah, it was. It was kind of like
Speaker 5: one of those things I'm a late processor about you guys,
Speaker 5: but like also it's like okay, cool, like this is cool.
Speaker 5: And then I remember flying back from from you know,
Speaker 5: we flying by it's like thirty hour flight back, and
Speaker 5: I'm like just sitting in my playing seat and I'm
Speaker 5: just start tearing up, and I'm like, yeah, what's going
Speaker 5: hot going, you know, and it starts hitting me like dang,
Speaker 5: like and Mom's never been back there ever, you know,
Speaker 5: in like almost seventy some years. She was born there.
Speaker 5: She was born there, you know, and they had to
Speaker 5: escape right away. They had to leave, you know, because
Speaker 5: it was like like you know, and so I was
Speaker 5: I was standing there and I'm watching all of this,
Speaker 5: and I go.
Speaker 1: Wow, other people, there's people living there.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there is there's people spot Yeah. And and I
Speaker 5: was watching the way that they make the food and stuff,
Speaker 5: and man, it still carries a little bit of like
Speaker 5: there's these flavored tones and these notes that still carry.
Speaker 5: But if you go to those villages, their technology is
Speaker 5: barely past the bronze age for real. Like you go in,
Speaker 5: it's just all like you know, they it's very very primitive.
Speaker 5: But the way they do things. I loved it, you know,
Speaker 5: because I'm watching them do things and I'm like, bro,
Speaker 5: I'm like bringing that technique back like that. And I
Speaker 5: felt like, you know, I've never been to Loust before, right,
Speaker 5: But I felt like the best way I explained it
Speaker 5: was it was like going to a home that you've
Speaker 5: never been to, but you still feel at home there.
Speaker 5: So that's how I felt up there. I was like dude,
Speaker 5: and and it was you know, seeing your own people there.
Speaker 5: And it was funny because like I'm a bigger dude,
Speaker 5: so I don't look like most Munk kids, you know,
Speaker 5: So a lot of times, like I was there, they
Speaker 5: didn't think I was Mung because the crew we were
Speaker 5: with had Lao Tai and you know, you know, like
Speaker 5: white people, and so they were just like they just
Speaker 5: thought I was one of the other helpers. And then
Speaker 5: I started speaking among them and they're like what you know?
Speaker 1: And I'm was it clear to them?
Speaker 5: You know? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, if you deal
Speaker 5: with this. But like I get, like I I work
Speaker 5: with like a lot of non Mung people. So when
Speaker 5: I do speak Munk, I go when I go home, right,
Speaker 5: you know with mom and dad, and then I'll speak Monk.
Speaker 5: But I don't speak monk, you know, like daily a lot,
Speaker 5: you know, And and I was really nervous. I was like, shoot,
Speaker 5: because like the OG's up there, man, they will wreck
Speaker 5: you if you're mong is like, you know, like if
Speaker 5: your mung is good or if you had the wrong accent.
Speaker 5: They're like, dude, you're a stupid kid, like, don't even
Speaker 5: say that start, but you're.
Speaker 1: Like, you know. Yanni says something similar about, uh, we're
Speaker 1: at a conversation recently where the Latvians in America police
Speaker 1: the Latvian. Then you go to Lava, they just want
Speaker 1: to talk English. Yeah, yeah, because they want to practice English.
Speaker 5: And when I got there, there was something inside of me.
Speaker 5: I don't know if it was like flight or flight
Speaker 5: inside of me. Then I started just speaking Monk and
Speaker 5: I did something to the translation part of the show,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm actually doing a
Speaker 5: lot better than I am.
Speaker 1: You know, can you give us a sense of what
Speaker 1: Monk sounds like?
Speaker 5: I don't know, it's weird.
Speaker 1: I mean just like, can you just say say some
Speaker 1: stuff just to give a sense of what the language
Speaker 1: sounds like for people. I'm guessing most people have not
Speaker 1: heard monk.
Speaker 8: Yeah, if you want to talk about the white people
Speaker 8: at the table with that's fine.
Speaker 1: Bunch of white people talking about the mom I don't
Speaker 1: even know how to start it.
Speaker 5: It's so weird.
Speaker 2: Uh, I'll say yeah and jikon.
Speaker 5: Studio can it yeah? Which okay, you know she thought
Speaker 5: yea and named that's you guys.
Speaker 1: How much overlap is there with I'm a little ignorant
Speaker 1: on the language structure. Is there a Laosian there's like
Speaker 1: there's yeah, is that the native language is called Laotan?
Speaker 5: Yeah, lao Okaya. Is there a lot of overlap.
Speaker 1: There's a few words, a few words, but generally they're
Speaker 1: like the sting.
Speaker 5: So for example, like the word burrito is not an
Speaker 5: English word, right, it's a Spanish word, but it's part
Speaker 5: of the English language. We say burrito burrito, right, Well
Speaker 5: you play it in scrabble, yeah, yeah. But in long words,
Speaker 5: there there's a few words that I wouldn't say overlap,
Speaker 5: but it's like art. Just because our cultures like are
Speaker 5: right with each other, they use different words, like like
Speaker 5: when I was in laos bathroom and long word is honah,
Speaker 5: that's bathroom, but for the laower is honam.
Speaker 1: You know, So it's like a little bit that would
Speaker 1: be that would be an example of a similarity.
Speaker 5: Yep, you know, uh yeah, the word the word go
Speaker 5: like by right, that's that's like I've learned that that
Speaker 5: was that's thaie yep so thy lao uh you know,
Speaker 5: and even even a little bit of Vietnamese like they
Speaker 5: share like culinary wise, they all kind of share the
Speaker 5: same kind of word, right, even a little bit of Chinese,
Speaker 5: you know, like the steam bund you know, like the
Speaker 5: Chinese seam bun is called bao, but the the Lao
Speaker 5: Thai and mungk version of his callabao, you know, because
Speaker 5: they have the word bow at the end, you know.
Speaker 5: So so like there's all these little like you know,
Speaker 5: I don't want to say that they're crossovers, but there's
Speaker 5: like you you you pull from each other right again,
Speaker 5: Like like my my example is always the word burrito
Speaker 5: when I tell sometimes, I told this guy wants to burrito,
Speaker 5: isn't no, no, that's like an American word. I'm like, bro,
Speaker 5: burrito is not an American word, okay. And I had
Speaker 5: to explain to him He's like what I always thought
Speaker 5: it was like an American thing, and like stop like stop,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 6: But you know, like kind of like that, could you
Speaker 6: guys understand tie, I.
Speaker 5: Know, I don't speak to no, no, no, we it's
Speaker 5: it's all, and you know, growing up like you grow
Speaker 5: like among is, it's totally its own, totally different language.
Speaker 5: And our our language has eight tones to it, so
Speaker 5: it's our language is completely tonal right. So here's here's
Speaker 5: a funny one I always tell people. So when you
Speaker 5: don't know something, this isn't related to the number of clans, no,
Speaker 5: no tones in your language. So for example, like when
Speaker 5: I say I don't know, like in the word I
Speaker 5: don't know, guccipo, you know, but if you do it
Speaker 5: with the wrong tone guccio, which means I smell like
Speaker 5: fart yeah yeah, well yeah fart yeah. Uh, it's so
Speaker 5: so it's like that. So it's like when when I
Speaker 5: have white friends.
Speaker 1: What a minefield, man, Dude, Like I learned the language.
Speaker 5: The thing is when you have white friends that are
Speaker 5: teaching me among the phrase, and I'm like, okay, but
Speaker 5: if you say it in the wrong tone, you're gonna
Speaker 5: totally say something horrible, like what what do you mean?
Speaker 5: And then it's always like it sounds the same right,
Speaker 5: And I'm like, no, dude, you just said you smell
Speaker 5: like part like you know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Steve Steve, the the written form of the Monk language
Speaker 2: wasn't actually created by a monk person.
Speaker 5: It was created.
Speaker 2: It was founded by a French priest. So he came
Speaker 2: into and I shared this a little bit when I
Speaker 2: was first here. He came into that that region, worked
Speaker 2: with the monk, understood language, learned language, and came up
Speaker 2: with the written version.
Speaker 5: Of it in using English letter. Yes, using English.
Speaker 1: Try to dance around the tone issue.
Speaker 2: Oh, he figured a way to He found the tone,
Speaker 2: He figured a way to capture the tones, and he
Speaker 2: created this in the early forties.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you just add a lot more words, oh, clarifying, Yeah,
Speaker 8: by which I mean, well.
Speaker 5: Like what what was incredible with what he did when
Speaker 5: he took our language from an oral history to a
Speaker 5: written history is he didn't realize what he did was
Speaker 5: he changed history for our people. So in our culture
Speaker 5: everything's oral, right, So it's like you tell us story
Speaker 5: and the next person tells that story and they have
Speaker 5: to keep it to exactly the tea right, you can't
Speaker 5: divert from it because for us, like for example, like
Speaker 5: my father would always tell us like two like two
Speaker 5: fathers making a deal. It was you just said it,
Speaker 5: you have people witnessed to say it, and then you
Speaker 5: shook your hand and that was it. It wasn't like
Speaker 5: we write a contract and we sign it out. So
Speaker 5: in our culture, your word means everything. Being a man
Speaker 5: of honor, being a person of honor, being a person integrity.
Speaker 5: That means everything. You keep to your word. You say
Speaker 5: I'm going to be here on Tuesday to help you,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna be here on Tuesday to help you. There's
Speaker 5: no contract that needs to be done. That's our culture.
Speaker 5: When the French priest came in and said, hey, I'm
Speaker 5: going to put this into written form, he changed our
Speaker 5: world because before the way that we would tell our
Speaker 5: history is you hand it down from generation to generation.
Speaker 5: One father talks about his father that who told him
Speaker 5: a story from his father. Right our elders right now,
Speaker 5: they are elders that are in the seventies and eighties
Speaker 5: that are passing away there they are our historical archives.
Speaker 5: Inside their minds hold our history. As they are passing away,
Speaker 5: our history is going with them. So there's a project
Speaker 5: that where I'm working on saying how do we record this?
Speaker 5: How do we write these things down? How do we
Speaker 5: film this? How do we record this? Because the idea
Speaker 5: of just writing something down for our people was so
Speaker 5: brand staking new in the fifties.
Speaker 1: There's like a recapture.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but what it does is you were able to
Speaker 5: record history. Like for example, my father when he came
Speaker 5: to this country, he had to make up a birthday
Speaker 5: because he didn't know when he was born, so he
Speaker 5: chose January first, it's his birthday. A lot of the
Speaker 5: most the first day that came to my mind, well
Speaker 5: a lot of if you look at a lot of
Speaker 5: refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia at the time, January
Speaker 5: first is what they use because it was the most simplest, like, hey,
Speaker 5: this is the day, you know. And then he was
Speaker 5: asked to give a signature.
Speaker 1: But they're going off the Gregorian calendar and not the
Speaker 1: lunar calendar, or they just knew that it was.
Speaker 5: They just did that because because of the NGO workers
Speaker 5: that were in these refugee camps, it goes, well, January first,
Speaker 5: that's the first of the year, and so that's what
Speaker 5: they did, I mean. And then it was then he
Speaker 5: had to learn how to sign his name and by
Speaker 5: at the point because he didn't have to. But now
Speaker 5: when he signed his name on those documents, like it
Speaker 5: was literally what he said was the NGO worker wrote
Speaker 5: out my dad's name incursive, and then my dad put
Speaker 5: a paper on top and he traced it. So dad
Speaker 5: had to learn how to write in English. The first
Speaker 5: thing he wrote was his name to sign his name
Speaker 5: on those documents for our family to come here. It
Speaker 5: changed the course of history for his family and changed
Speaker 5: the course history for me. So like to me, writing
Speaker 5: is very important and how it preserves our culture, that's
Speaker 5: very important because anytime we need information we're gonna do
Speaker 5: we go to our phone and we you know what,
Speaker 5: I don't second think like reading. I don't think about
Speaker 5: much about it. It's like I read. My parents can't
Speaker 5: read English and they can't speak English. And so growing up,
Speaker 5: when we went to doctor's visit a year a year,
Speaker 5: had to be the translator, so I would remember. Really, yeah,
Speaker 5: imagine how awkward it is is you go into the
Speaker 5: doctor's office and you have to translate about your mom's
Speaker 5: health issues somewhere on her body to the doctor, and
Speaker 5: then the doctor had to tell you these other things
Speaker 5: about some infection whatever, and then you had to explained
Speaker 5: that you're at his eight year old. We did that
Speaker 5: growing up. That's what we did and we I just
Speaker 5: thought that was normal, but it's incredible about like the
Speaker 5: reading and writing and how that changed the course of
Speaker 5: history for our people.
Speaker 2: I purposely text my dad and Monk just to keep
Speaker 2: up with, you know, the reading and the writing, because
Speaker 2: I learned how to read and write it.
Speaker 5: Is there a monk keyboard on an iPhone? No, it uses.
Speaker 2: Uses, you know, the regular used alpha alphabet, and so
Speaker 2: if you know the eight tones, also the monk.
Speaker 1: There's no mong al, there's no.
Speaker 5: No, no, the friend. Yeah, it's it's all English letters.
Speaker 2: It's not phonetic because if I wrote some stuff out
Speaker 2: here and you read it, you it wouldn't it be gibberish? Right,
Speaker 2: So if you didn't know kind of the conventions of
Speaker 2: the language in.
Speaker 1: Order to use it, using the letters as symbols.
Speaker 2: But it's not phenomical, it's not phonetic, but you're using
Speaker 2: the letters as the Roman indicators of what you know.
Speaker 2: Like for example, the last letter in the word. If
Speaker 2: I wrote out a word, the last letter indicates what
Speaker 2: tone you're supposed to say that word in.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me, let me, let me hate, let me
Speaker 1: hate you with this, you see, I'm using this this
Speaker 1: conventional quirity keyboard or whatever. I kep using like these
Speaker 1: letters the English alphabet, and I put down A. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you see A. What do you see when you
Speaker 1: see A with your Mong brain? That's not that's not
Speaker 1: among word? Then okay, but I'm saying the letter U.
Speaker 5: I guess I would go with. I would start it
Speaker 5: would start out as kind of phonetic, so I would say,
Speaker 5: you're trying to get ah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, I thought you meant maybe that they
Speaker 1: were It doesn't matter what thought. I thought you meant
Speaker 1: that they use these symbols but assign them totally different meanings.
Speaker 4: No, No, I think it's like if you wrote out dog,
Speaker 4: but then at the end of dog there was an S,
Speaker 4: and then you wrote out dog and then there might
Speaker 4: have been an R. You might say dog one way
Speaker 4: that means one thing with the S, and then you
Speaker 4: might say dog a different way.
Speaker 5: Yah, yeah, and then and then don't forget. Don't forget that.
Speaker 5: The Mung language we also have two dialects too, yes,
Speaker 5: correct tones. Two dialects, well sometimes three, because if you like,
Speaker 5: they have their own dialect too, then the monk Shua
Speaker 5: they have their own dialect too. But yeah, but basic Mung.
Speaker 5: There's two dialects. You have your white and your green,
Speaker 5: you know, or blue, because the Mung word for green
Speaker 5: and blue is the same word ju, which means blue
Speaker 5: and green.
Speaker 4: I got a couple of questions. Okay here putting that
Speaker 4: out there before we get too late.
Speaker 1: The I'll say what I was gonna ask weave this in.
Speaker 1: I was gonna ask when you went to that village,
Speaker 1: did they have air guns? And did they hunt and whatnot?
Speaker 5: Yeah, you want to go there, you throw it into
Speaker 5: the mix real quick.
Speaker 4: One about birthdays, But prior to having a birthday or
Speaker 4: like picking a date, did they celebrate some sort of
Speaker 4: version of our birthday? Like did the monk celebrate that
Speaker 4: before being Americans annual milestone of some sort.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good that's a good question. Oh, go ahead,
Speaker 2: I would say, even if they did, it probably wasn't
Speaker 2: like how we do it here, No big care.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 1: No cake and can.
Speaker 5: Mounts of loose candles aren't like the number one priority
Speaker 5: to buy. It's like, oh, hey, we have thirty cents candles.
Speaker 5: That's where we're going.
Speaker 2: And you know, you know, for the longest time, you know,
Speaker 2: I would say that I don't even know my true
Speaker 2: birth date, right, It was kind of just something that
Speaker 2: was given to me, right and so and so they
Speaker 2: kind of go by, Oh, actually if you yes, our
Speaker 2: parents they'd be like, oh, yeah, you were born in
Speaker 2: this time frame.
Speaker 5: It's like a guess.
Speaker 1: You don't know your you don't know you're actually.
Speaker 5: The one time or school government. I have one, but
Speaker 5: is that really truly the day? So you just you
Speaker 5: know if you were born in the spring or the fall. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's it's a guess. It's like, yeah, it's really funny though.
Speaker 5: This is exactly like talking to my mother. Suld be like,
Speaker 5: well you're you're born in yeah, well you know the harvest.
Speaker 5: See what's fishing walleye when you were born or something
Speaker 5: that's awesome.
Speaker 8: I do want to hear about like the proteins, like
Speaker 8: the cooking side. So not a lot of fish. I
Speaker 8: guess specific to your it.
Speaker 5: Depends, like for for our restaurant or like just for
Speaker 5: munk food in general. I guess munk food in general,
Speaker 5: it depends. Uh, you know, I think that a lot
Speaker 5: of our people are mountain people, so it's what you
Speaker 5: get from the mountains, you know, and then you know,
Speaker 5: if there's streams and stuff like that, you get you know,
Speaker 5: little fish, you know, and stuff like that, but it's not,
Speaker 5: you know, we're we're not. We're not like you know,
Speaker 5: we're not in the lowlands by you know, the ocean.
Speaker 5: So it was like like so the idea of shrimp
Speaker 5: and different kinds of octopus and stuff like that, and
Speaker 5: crabs and you know that's really later on, you know,
Speaker 5: because that's kind of like the high life. Like and
Speaker 5: when I say in the mountains, dude, I'm talking about
Speaker 5: like the reason why in nineteen eighty there's six hundred
Speaker 5: month people that ended up in Missoulu. It's like they
Speaker 5: love the mountains because you just want to be left alone.
Speaker 5: It's like our people has been like we only left alone.
Speaker 5: We want to be farmers, that's all we want to do.
Speaker 5: And so for them to for for for them, it
Speaker 5: was like when if you go to a city, it
Speaker 5: was like back in you know, back in the day
Speaker 5: my mom's times. They were said it would be like
Speaker 5: as five to six hour walk that you would just
Speaker 5: trek down the mountain and then you you know, you
Speaker 5: sell some vegetables, you get enough money to buy salt,
Speaker 5: and then you just trek back up and you'll use
Speaker 5: that salt, you know, and then it's like when you
Speaker 5: get down there, you're like, whoa. You see these shrimp
Speaker 5: and crab and it's like, wow, just to have one
Speaker 5: would be incredible, you know. And so but again a
Speaker 5: lot of that changes with our people changing, you know,
Speaker 5: as some home people came down from the mountain and
Speaker 5: started living in the lowlands, and then even us being
Speaker 5: here in America, you know, and you know, I mean,
Speaker 5: I love seafood and you know, but normally you don't
Speaker 5: you don't see that it's you know, it's a heavy pork,
Speaker 5: a lot of small games, and a lot of vegetables,
Speaker 5: a lot of broth, you know, a lot of soup,
Speaker 5: a lot of stew. And if you want to go
Speaker 5: old school, I mean it's a lot of the meat
Speaker 5: is actually jerky basically, you know, like they season it
Speaker 5: really and then they hang it and they have a
Speaker 5: fire inside they hang it, and it is so cool
Speaker 5: to be in these villages and see them still using
Speaker 5: this technique and they hang it from the top and
Speaker 5: they dry it and then you take the meat out
Speaker 5: when you're done. And what the meat really is is
Speaker 5: it's a flavoring to your soups and your stews.
Speaker 1: Yeah, conservatively, absolutely, yeah. Did you still see some did
Speaker 1: you still see some hunting going on when you went back?
Speaker 5: Oh? Absolutely yeah, Yah yeah. We were hunting like these
Speaker 5: like little small squirrels and you know, lizards, you know,
Speaker 5: like monco lizards, and it's just anything that the jungle provides,
Speaker 5: you know. And that's like, that's the thing I love
Speaker 5: about being mung And that's what.
Speaker 1: Was the hunting deliberate, meaning like you were going out
Speaker 1: or was just that you would encounter stuff throughout the
Speaker 1: day of raising your crops and it traveling around.
Speaker 5: So again, in every culture, it's like the idea where
Speaker 5: it's like hey, boys, you want to go Oka, cool,
Speaker 5: let's go, you know, and so like sometimes it's literally
Speaker 5: like hey, let's go out. A lot of times, dude.
Speaker 5: One of my favorite scenes where we went was they
Speaker 5: weren't home. They were a loud but there were like
Speaker 5: five or six of them. They have scuba gear and
Speaker 5: the little like a little gear set and they jumped
Speaker 5: themway with a little spear guns and they would go
Speaker 5: spear like in the river they go and they would
Speaker 5: go spear little Tilapias and they came out and they
Speaker 5: freaking looked like a bunch of navy seals coming out
Speaker 5: of the water. And these these like little like you know,
Speaker 5: these Lao kids and they all have little spear guns
Speaker 5: and then just fishing on the other hand, and it
Speaker 5: was the most ba scene ever standing on the river
Speaker 5: and I'm like, man, you would kick the crap out
Speaker 5: of any American, you know. I'm like, if North Korea
Speaker 5: ever attacks, i want you on our team, you know.
Speaker 5: And and so I mean, that's that's what it is.
Speaker 5: It's a lot of times it's the when you're a
Speaker 5: little you know, where you're growing up, especially with the boys.
Speaker 5: It's like you go out with dad, you go out
Speaker 5: with your uncles. You learn they have little like snares
Speaker 5: and stuff they set up and you know, and then
Speaker 5: you know, you follow Grandpa and you go and grab
Speaker 5: the snare and see, oh look they gotta squirrel today
Speaker 5: or whatever, you know, and yeah, and so it it
Speaker 5: was just part of the repeat. I mean, like we
Speaker 5: went and we even caught bats, you know, so we
Speaker 5: ate bats, and people were, you know, freaked down, They're like, oh,
Speaker 5: what would you do that. I'm like, you have to understand.
Speaker 5: We don't have a whole foods out here, like we
Speaker 5: have a whole jungle, and you just get what the
Speaker 5: jungle provides for you.
Speaker 1: How they catch targets.
Speaker 5: Uh, so you figure like they figure out a bad cave,
Speaker 5: you know, and and then uh, during the night the
Speaker 5: bats will fly out. Uh, and so like six thirty
Speaker 5: best fight out and they just put up a big
Speaker 5: net and just catch all the bats in there and.
Speaker 1: Coming back into when they're leaving them, they catch them
Speaker 1: as they leave.
Speaker 5: Yes, sorry, yeah, leave and then they come back out
Speaker 5: like six in the morning. So it's like you know
Speaker 5: that it's like a million of them and you put
Speaker 5: on that and they kick it all caught and you know,
Speaker 5: and then you uh, you know, you braize them and
Speaker 5: you eat them. Yeah, it was just braise the hair
Speaker 5: right off of them. Well they throw it over the
Speaker 5: fire to kind of charge the hair off, and then
Speaker 5: they don't cut it out, you know, there's no you
Speaker 5: know whatever, and then guts it all right in the
Speaker 5: and then and then you they stick it in the bamboo. Actually,
Speaker 5: and they so they season it with like garlic, ginger,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, and all that stuff. And then
Speaker 5: they put it in a bamboo and they close the
Speaker 5: bamboo off with put it in there like a container,
Speaker 5: the bamboo, yeah, like yeah, as a container. And then
Speaker 5: they put a little water in there, and then that
Speaker 5: becomes a steaming vessel and they throw that rod over
Speaker 5: the fire. So bamboo is like like cooking inside of
Speaker 5: bamboo is like, by the way, that's going to be
Speaker 5: the thing where we want to try to do to
Speaker 5: just like I mean, it's this old school way of
Speaker 5: cooking when you really got to know how to do it.
Speaker 5: But like my father was telling me about it, where
Speaker 5: it's like basically the bamboo itself is it's a vessel
Speaker 5: and it's bamboo is just water and moisture. So you
Speaker 5: put you know, your meat in there, and then you
Speaker 5: close it the end off with banana leaves, and you
Speaker 5: just tough and you throw it right on the fire
Speaker 5: and just keep turning it and it just brazes inside.
Speaker 1: The problem with that ship is, uh, I brought a
Speaker 1: bunch of that home. Our buddy Clay, he's got a
Speaker 1: bunch of bamboo in his yard. I brought a bunch home.
Speaker 1: But it's cool, but ans soon as it drives out,
Speaker 1: just cracks the hell yeah, so you're gonna need a
Speaker 1: steady supply. Yeah, and it's really funny won't be able
Speaker 1: to have and you won't be able to have one well.
Speaker 5: Down in North Carolina, North Carolina, there's a bunch of
Speaker 5: monkey that lived down there. Uh, they planted bamboos in
Speaker 5: the back of their yard and now it's like invasive there. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and so they're just cutting down. And if you I
Speaker 5: got some cousins down there, you call them, they'll just
Speaker 5: send you a bunch up. Yeah. Yeah. Green Bamboo wrote
Speaker 5: real fresh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What was your earliest experience? Uh in uh, how old
Speaker 1: were you when you came to the US.
Speaker 5: It was like four and a half.
Speaker 1: So I'm assuming that they that your people they didn't
Speaker 1: hunt and fish in the refugee camp just because of
Speaker 1: the nature of the camp, right, they did too, like
Speaker 1: really like you could they could go as they please
Speaker 1: within a certain.
Speaker 5: Kind of yeah. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 5: it was it's a huge So so you got to
Speaker 5: realize that that refugee camp, held from seventy five to
Speaker 5: ninety two, held ninety thousand people. So it's like it's
Speaker 5: a city. Yeah, and it was big, and there wasn't
Speaker 5: like here's here's the borders, here's the wall. It's just like,
Speaker 5: you know, you can go into the jungle and you
Speaker 5: can hunt and you can do things. There were people
Speaker 5: that were they had gardens and you know they were
Speaker 5: you know, people that were selling stuff in there too.
Speaker 1: So yeah, then when he in the US, what was
Speaker 1: your earliest exposure to hunting here in the US.
Speaker 5: My parents like hunt, my aunts and uncle or you know,
Speaker 5: my uncles and them hunt, and so it was, you
Speaker 5: know when when deer season came around, and you know,
Speaker 5: like we always had a deer, you know, one or two. Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the cool thing about the moon culture and yeah,
Speaker 5: you can contest to this is like the way that
Speaker 5: it works in our family because I grew up in
Speaker 5: a small town in Wisconsin. It was all cousins, right,
Speaker 5: uncles and them all living around there. And if one
Speaker 5: of them got a deer, no matter at the time
Speaker 5: of the day, like if it was like nine o'clock,
Speaker 5: we got a deer, they call, and then our whole
Speaker 5: family would just go over there and everybody just breaks
Speaker 5: it down and then we just make a meal out
Speaker 5: of it. Oh yeah, dude, Like I didn't understand. I
Speaker 5: didn't know that you can get the deer process. I
Speaker 5: was just like, wait, what what like you pay someone
Speaker 5: else the process you're deer. I'm like, why don't you
Speaker 5: guys just do it? And they're like no, why or
Speaker 5: you know, and it's just like it was always like
Speaker 5: and when I when I got into the food world,
Speaker 5: everyone was like, oh, knows the tail cooking man, that's
Speaker 5: the cool thing. Knows the tail cooking. I'm like, do
Speaker 5: we call it a Tuesday?
Speaker 1: At house?
Speaker 5: That was an everyday thing, you know, so it was normal.
Speaker 5: It was normal growing up. You know. We didn't go
Speaker 5: to the grocery store for pork, like we went to
Speaker 5: an amage farm and then like picking lobster, Dad goes
Speaker 5: that one and then he you know, and then he
Speaker 5: does his thing to it, and then we all kids
Speaker 5: like okay, everyone grab a knife and then we helped
Speaker 5: break it down, you know. And I was like, I didn't.
Speaker 5: I didn't grow up playing, didn't go in basketball camp
Speaker 5: or you know, throwing learning how to throw a baseball.
Speaker 5: This is what I did. And I thought it was normal,
Speaker 5: you know. I thought it was like every kid did this.
Speaker 5: Then I found out. I remember the day I found
Speaker 5: out that way you can just buy pork at the
Speaker 5: grocery store all chopped. Yeah, like what it blew my
Speaker 5: mind in college when I figure that out, that's amazing.
Speaker 5: I love that.
Speaker 1: At what point did you think that you're gonna get
Speaker 1: into the food biz like the rest of Yes, So
Speaker 1: it did it seem like a lot of obstacles.
Speaker 5: No, I was always so I'm a I'm a like
Speaker 5: if I touch it with my hand, I can understand
Speaker 5: it better. I'm not. My brothers and sisters are super academic.
Speaker 5: They're really smart. They're incredible. But for me, I was like,
Speaker 5: I'll read a book and I'm like, duh, I don't
Speaker 5: know what happened here, you know. But like if you
Speaker 5: put stuff in front of me and says, hey, like
Speaker 5: break down this chicken, and i'm'll show you where the
Speaker 5: joints are or where they're like, Hey, this is how
Speaker 5: we break down a deer, or this is how we
Speaker 5: break down a rabbit, I could like my dad would
Speaker 5: show me He'll break it up and goes, here are
Speaker 5: the joints you need to cut. Here are the four cuts.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, oh, cool, you know, and it made
Speaker 5: sense to me. I didn't like my parents didn't want
Speaker 5: me to cook, because they felt that that was a
Speaker 5: very hard job.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: My father said to me, he said, we came to
Speaker 5: this country so that you can sit I want you
Speaker 5: to sit in a nice office somewhere and signing people's checks. Doctor, lawyer, doctor,
Speaker 5: that was your choice. Yeah, doctor, lawyer or some kind
Speaker 5: of business person.
Speaker 1: I heard that we had, uh South Vietnamese dude explain that.
Speaker 1: He said, you're either a doctor lawyer. You're not my kid.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I remember as a kid growing three choices. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And as a kid growing up, I I hated that
Speaker 5: and I was like, oh frick, like I'm not smart enough.
Speaker 5: And I remember, uh, this this actually hit me probably
Speaker 5: about like three or four years ago, and I realized
Speaker 5: what my father is saying, because he would always be like,
Speaker 5: I don't want your hands and your knees to hurt
Speaker 5: like mine. Because my dad was a carpenter, he was
Speaker 5: a he was a welder, he was a he built homes,
Speaker 5: you know, and he goes, I don't want this for you.
Speaker 5: He goes, I take the pain so you would never
Speaker 5: have to. And as a kid you didn't understand that.
Speaker 5: You're like whatever, dad, As an adult like it, like
Speaker 5: he always said. My dad always say, I mean, don't
Speaker 5: be like me. I'm dumb. Yeah, I want you to
Speaker 5: be smarter than me. I want you to be better
Speaker 5: than me. And I get super emotional about this, but
Speaker 5: like I remember I was cooking at this grill out
Speaker 5: and it was huge. It was long day, and my
Speaker 5: hands were all sooted up from the you know, from
Speaker 5: cutting all day and from working the fire, and my
Speaker 5: hands are just like tired, and my knees are tired.
Speaker 5: In that moment, I was like, I feel the closest
Speaker 5: to my father, where I'm like I am you and
Speaker 5: I want to be you, you know, like like he's
Speaker 5: a great man, he's like a hero, and I'm just
Speaker 5: and I get what he was saying, Like I get
Speaker 5: what he was saying. I don't want you to be
Speaker 5: like me because I'm dumb, but I'm like, no, man
Speaker 5: like everything that's good about you, integrity, honor, how to
Speaker 5: be a man like I learned that from you. How
Speaker 5: to but your meat. I learned that from you. I
Speaker 5: want to be like you. And that's why I love
Speaker 5: being a cook because and you're like, how can those
Speaker 5: things be bad?
Speaker 1: Damn?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, But all he wants is like as any refugee
Speaker 5: and immigrants, like, I want what's better. Like you guys
Speaker 5: are fathers, you get it. You want to set up
Speaker 5: a life that's better for your children that you had.
Speaker 5: You want you don't want them to go through pain
Speaker 5: and struggle. And I get it. And when I was young,
Speaker 5: I was dumb. I didn't get that. I was just
Speaker 5: like what dad doesn't care? Now it's like, yeah, like
Speaker 5: I love working the field with him, I love bringing
Speaker 5: down animals with him, you know.
Speaker 1: You know, I think the a thing that he's probably
Speaker 1: thinking about too, is that like if he knew that
Speaker 1: you could do, if he knew that you could work
Speaker 1: with your hands and and like be around heat and
Speaker 1: struggle but then find some level of security, it would
Speaker 1: have been different. But he's probably associating him. He's associating
Speaker 1: labor and struggle with struggle, yeah, and not labor and
Speaker 1: struggle with with some sort of success and security.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Because what I'm saying, because you could probably do I
Speaker 1: bet you now. Oh like now he probably looks at
Speaker 1: you and he's probably proud of shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know it was. It was one of these
Speaker 5: things where we did this event and the lieutenant governor
Speaker 5: came by and gave me this little award and whatever,
Speaker 5: and it was like, you know whatever. And I remember
Speaker 5: my dad didn't say this, but he said to my mom,
Speaker 5: he said, he said something along the lines of like,
Speaker 5: I live in a world now where my son can
Speaker 5: speak and leaders will listen to him, and like in
Speaker 5: our culture, that's huge, and I and and it's not
Speaker 5: like I don't ever believe that my dad was never
Speaker 5: proud of me, But in that moment he said, I
Speaker 5: think he even said to me, he goes, I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: I just didn't know what you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you took an unexpected pathway, like you took a
Speaker 1: really unexpected pathway to get to somewhere that made sense
Speaker 1: to him, because what made sense to him was just
Speaker 1: that you that you knew how you were gonna eat,
Speaker 1: You knew how you were gonna take care of yourself,
Speaker 1: you knew how you were not going to struggle and
Speaker 1: not be under someone's thumb, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so it's like it's very different now. But man,
Speaker 5: like I said, you know, and even with Korean and
Speaker 5: we were talking our pre production, we were talking about this,
Speaker 5: and I was just like, dude, my life was pretty
Speaker 5: so like it. It is what I do is I
Speaker 5: get to speak on their legacy. So about five years ago,
Speaker 5: my dad had a horrible accident from work, or five
Speaker 5: or six years ago, and he was in the ICU
Speaker 5: and he fell. He shattered his skull and not doctors
Speaker 5: like we don't know what's gonna happen. And I remember
Speaker 5: I just started his whole food stuff and you know,
Speaker 5: we were getting some you know, some push and people
Speaker 5: were like really excited. And at that point it was like, hey, man,
Speaker 5: like there is this new kid. He's making monk food
Speaker 5: blah blah blah blah whatever. And I remember visiting him
Speaker 5: in the ICU. It's my dad's my hero man like
Speaker 5: he's he's a freaking warrior, right, he fought a war
Speaker 5: like he like, I thought to myself. I remember holding
Speaker 5: his hand at the in the intensive carry unit, and
Speaker 5: I just thought to myself, this is not how warriors die.
Speaker 5: This is not how heroes die. They either die on
Speaker 5: the battlefield in a great fight where they die as
Speaker 5: an old man around like all their grandkids and all
Speaker 5: the people around them. Like, they don't die by slipping
Speaker 5: on a stupid ladder at work, you know, And and
Speaker 5: and and fracturing their skull on a job that they
Speaker 5: didn't ever need to be in, right, And I was
Speaker 5: so pissed at myself, and I'm like, what the frick, dude.
Speaker 5: And I remember driving back, it was like three hour driving.
Speaker 5: They were in Marshall, Wisconsin at that time, and I
Speaker 5: was driving back to Minneapolis, and I just thought to myself,
Speaker 5: my life's got a change, man, Like I can't. It
Speaker 5: can't be about Oh, we're gonna make this stuff to
Speaker 5: be about mung food. No, man, It's gonna be about
Speaker 5: their legacy. And because we have to. Why do we
Speaker 5: always wait for people to pass away to talk about them,
Speaker 5: to talk about how great they were? You know, like
Speaker 5: why not? Now? Why not when they can see it?
Speaker 5: And so, man, life is pretty simple for me. And
Speaker 5: we get to travel the country. We get to make
Speaker 5: food for thousands of people through our restaurant, through events
Speaker 5: we do around the country, where at the end, like
Speaker 5: we talk about mung food. But at the end, I
Speaker 5: can take that story back and I'm like, I want
Speaker 5: you to tell you. I want to tell you guys
Speaker 5: about this legacy that means so much to me and
Speaker 5: and for me, one of the things that I really
Speaker 5: love doing. That's why I think that it really shows
Speaker 5: in hunting, right, And I think in hunting it's about legacy, right.
Speaker 5: It's about like, hey, if there's this piece of land
Speaker 5: that belonged to my great great grandfather that was passed down,
Speaker 5: passed down, we can hunt in it, we can enjoy it,
Speaker 5: our kids kids can enjoy it. And it was one
Speaker 5: of those things where it becomes this initiative of mine.
Speaker 5: You know, my parents have always worked these gardens, and
Speaker 5: there was all the properties always rental, and so it's like, yep,
Speaker 5: one of my goals, I'm gonna buy them a guarden.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna buy them a piece of land that's like
Speaker 5: in their name, the LLC is in their name. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so that before they passed away, before the Lord takes
Speaker 5: them away, like they have a piece of paper that
Speaker 5: says this is yours, you know. And so that's kind
Speaker 5: of another initiative where I'm really passionate about, you know,
Speaker 5: because it's cool. Yeah, that's all they want to do.
Speaker 5: And so yeah, so we again, I get to do
Speaker 5: all that. And that's why I get excited about especially
Speaker 5: when we talk about mung food.
Speaker 1: When to get into the food businesses, you have to
Speaker 1: go cook someone else's food before you could do mung food.
Speaker 1: Is just get right into mung food.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. I did not want to cook mung food because
Speaker 5: I was super embarrassed about it. Because I was super embarrassed.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just like, oh, you know, what food
Speaker 1: did you think you had to make to be legitimate.
Speaker 5: I didn't think I either make a certain food. I
Speaker 5: just had to be good at cooking. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: I mean, I mean, like cooking is it's basic, right,
Speaker 5: It's like, you know, it's like breaking down an animal.
Speaker 5: If it's a four legged creature, it's they're all basically
Speaker 5: the same kind of you know, they're breaking down those parts.
Speaker 5: So my whole thing was I was decent, Like I
Speaker 5: was never I don't think I was ever a good cook.
Speaker 5: I was just fast enough to keep up with the
Speaker 5: tickets that came in. And I was the only one
Speaker 5: I remember started cooking. I was the only one that
Speaker 5: lived like kind of like a straight life, you know.
Speaker 5: So like so my chefs are always like, dude, I
Speaker 5: just know that tomorrow you're at seven or at you know,
Speaker 5: on Saturday, at ten am, you're gonna come in and
Speaker 5: you're not gonna be like in jail or hungover or whatever.
Speaker 5: So so they that they're just like And that's what
Speaker 5: I tell any young kid who wants to get into
Speaker 5: food or any kind of work. I'm like, just show up,
Speaker 5: bro if you show up like these kids I got today, See,
Speaker 5: I don't tell you. I just say show up, just
Speaker 5: show up. And you know, my old mentor of mine,
Speaker 5: Mark Brockberg, from college, would always say he used the
Speaker 5: acronym fat, fat, faithful, available, teachable, show up and be faithful,
Speaker 5: available and teachable, you know. And that's just what I did.
Speaker 5: And I was it was like a strategy. It was
Speaker 5: just like all I know how to do, you know?
Speaker 5: And and eventually I just learned and learned and and
Speaker 5: so what my goal is whatever kitchen you want to
Speaker 5: put me in, Like i might not be the best,
Speaker 5: but I'm gonna show up, I'm gonna work hard. I'm
Speaker 5: gonna outwork everyone here, and even if it means like
Speaker 5: I'm the last one out, I'll be the last one out.
Speaker 5: And that was and again, that was something my father
Speaker 5: instilled me, and I just I didn't realize at a
Speaker 5: young age. And now it's just like you know, you
Speaker 5: get all these young chefs who comes in and they're like, oh,
Speaker 5: look at my founder ie. I like, oh yeah, I
Speaker 5: want to start my own YouTube channel. And you're just
Speaker 5: like okay, dude, like go peel like eight thousand pounds
Speaker 5: of potatoes then we'll talk. You know.
Speaker 1: It's just like that was that There's that quote that's
Speaker 1: attributed to one of the guys from Lynyrd Skinner, which
Speaker 1: was learn how to play your guitar and then get sexy.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, and restaurant, I just go learn how to
Speaker 5: use a knife. And I don't know if you'll ever
Speaker 5: be sexy, but you know.
Speaker 1: So what was the first chance to do? Like how
Speaker 1: did it happen that all sudd you got to start
Speaker 1: doing your uh you know your you're Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I was working through all these different restaurants Minieppois.
Speaker 5: They're incredible restaurants, The chefs were amazing.
Speaker 1: High end places.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yep, yep, yep. You know, and and and
Speaker 5: I would I had this ability to learn from some
Speaker 5: really really great teams, and then I was like, okay,
Speaker 5: well let's start out with this little pop up. So
Speaker 5: we started like a little pop up and people are
Speaker 5: like what's the pop up? And you're like, I don't know.
Speaker 5: Just come in on Friday and you were open for
Speaker 5: five hours and just eat. So we did that and
Speaker 5: then we're like, I don't know, and who was showing up?
Speaker 5: Mong people? Yeah, so long people. Here here's the thing.
Speaker 1: There's a you know how, there's like they don't mind
Speaker 1: throwing down some box on food.
Speaker 5: Well, here's the deal. Here's the deal. You know how,
Speaker 5: there's black Twitter. There's munk Facebook. Okay, I didn't know.
Speaker 5: I don't know about Okay, Well yeah there's black Twitter
Speaker 5: and there's munk Facebook. And let me tell you the
Speaker 5: thing with our community, it's a big community, but it's
Speaker 5: a small community. Yeah. Know's what I'm talking about. If
Speaker 5: some if one of the if one of your sons
Speaker 5: went and wronged like some other girl from another clan,
Speaker 5: like trust me, his picture will be up. Everybody's gonna know.
Speaker 5: You know, they're like, oh we know what clan he's
Speaker 5: come from. Oh we know what village he lives in,
Speaker 5: or what town he's from. Oh yeah, we know his
Speaker 5: cousins like you will be ratted out so fast in there.
Speaker 5: So there's munk Facebook. Now as much as.
Speaker 1: Apparently it works for you and against you.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. So somehow on Munk Facebook said hey, there's this
Speaker 5: new kid that's doing like mungk food in East Ie,
Speaker 5: Saint Paul in this little place called cook Saint Paul.
Speaker 5: My buddy owned this place. It was as a diner,
Speaker 5: so it was opened in the you know, breakfast and lunch,
Speaker 5: and it was evening was closed and then.
Speaker 1: Friday he took over the evenings.
Speaker 5: Yeah, once a month, that was it. And I still
Speaker 5: and then at that time, I was still from Mon Monday,
Speaker 5: you know, from Sunday to Thursday, I was working at
Speaker 5: Coastal Seafoods. I was a fishmonger, you know, because like
Speaker 5: I did the birchery stuff and I'm like I want
Speaker 5: to learn more about fish. So like I would do fish.
Speaker 5: I smell like fish all day. And then Friday Saturday,
Speaker 5: once once a month, we would do these little pop ups.
Speaker 5: And I never wanted to be the kid who said,
Speaker 5: oh yeah, I want to go to our own business
Speaker 5: like people like, you know right now you have all
Speaker 5: these like how to be an entrepreneur, Like that's not
Speaker 5: man Like this is so dumb, you know. And then
Speaker 5: eventually we were very blessed to have a few media
Speaker 5: people pick up on it and said, hey, let's talk
Speaker 5: about this, you know, and and and then yeah, that
Speaker 5: was like seven years ago.
Speaker 1: But when you first did the pop up you had,
Speaker 1: it was Mung coming. Yes, we had at some point,
Speaker 1: but it's so just organically caught out with people who
Speaker 1: just wanted to try new things.
Speaker 5: Well, in the Twin Cities, Mung are really well known,
Speaker 5: you know, so we have a few big shops in there,
Speaker 5: so people they are likely to know. Oh yeah, I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, seventy five thousand in the metro we are
Speaker 5: the you know, largest uh bipod group you know in
Speaker 5: the Twin City. So like there, I mean it's Mung
Speaker 5: and Somalians, you know, and so it's it's huge. Uh
Speaker 5: So what happened was, you know, we had some Mong
Speaker 5: people came. But then like and this was a while back,
Speaker 5: and this was the beginning. How do I see this?
Speaker 5: I have this like love hate with quote unquote food influencers,
Speaker 5: you know. Yeah, and and so this this was the
Speaker 5: beginning of like Instagram food influencing or like quote unquote foodie.
Speaker 5: When people say foodie, I'm just like everyone's a foodie.
Speaker 5: You eat food right there, your foodie just chill.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 1: It's a concept that's kind of dying. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, real excited about it for a while though,
Speaker 1: absolutely right.
Speaker 5: And so we had a few who were just really
Speaker 5: gracious and they were like, hey, we really love what
Speaker 5: you're doing. So we're just like so they just kept
Speaker 5: following us around, they just kept putting social media is like, hey,
Speaker 5: like Union Munk Kitchen's here, Union Mounkitchen. I was so
Speaker 5: embarrassed of being mung in the beginning too, bro, Like,
Speaker 5: I'll be honest here with you guys. Is it was
Speaker 5: called Union Kitchen. I didn't want to put the word
Speaker 5: mung in there because I didn't want white people to
Speaker 5: be deterred, right. And I had a buddy who was
Speaker 5: a PR guy who works for a big PR firm,
Speaker 5: and he goes, dude, don't be a chicken man. He's
Speaker 5: a white dude, r white Jewish dude. He goes, put
Speaker 5: the word mung on it. I'm like, really, like, is
Speaker 5: do you think he's like do it? And so for
Speaker 5: the first like year, was just Union Kitchen, Union kitchen,
Speaker 5: you know, And and and I we changed it to
Speaker 5: Union Munk Kitchen and people were like, yeah, like this
Speaker 5: is amazing, you know, and so like I I still
Speaker 5: went on my own little journey of like I don't
Speaker 5: know if people are gonna like this. And again we
Speaker 5: were very blessed. And then after a while there was
Speaker 5: like different you know, stuff came in and you know,
Speaker 5: we were just like hopping. We eventually got this little
Speaker 5: food trailer at a brewery that we did food out of.
Speaker 5: But what really helped us was no joke the catering world,
Speaker 5: like catering weddings we killed. We catered by mitzvahs and
Speaker 5: bar mitzvahs. That was so awesome, Like this is what
Speaker 5: I talk about. We always say about food is a
Speaker 5: universal language we can use to speak to each other. Right,
Speaker 5: it's amazing. I mean I think it's what I love
Speaker 5: what you guys do where it's like we're not just
Speaker 5: only hunting animal, but but we we cook it together.
Speaker 5: And it's just just like, oh, I might not be
Speaker 5: like into the hunting scene, but the cooking things, like dude,
Speaker 5: that's really cool. Like food has this ability to bring
Speaker 5: everybody together. And so we got a call in this
Speaker 5: uh this person was like you know, the Saint Paul
Speaker 5: Mayer like the I think they were like they knew
Speaker 5: the mayor of Saint Paul or something. Then they're like, hey,
Speaker 5: my I have a bum mitzvah coming up. And we
Speaker 5: were like we can't do pork obviously, but we'll do
Speaker 5: everything else. So we're like okay, and so we catered
Speaker 5: like abuvements and then then through the like the Jewish community,
Speaker 5: they heard about it, and then another Jewish family's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: can we do a barmitzvah for us? I'm like sure,
Speaker 5: you know, and we were in a synagogue.
Speaker 1: We were like a nationless nationless people bring them up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like I'm like, we are kind of weird cousins.
Speaker 5: Let's do this. You know, you lost bought you guys.
Speaker 5: Don't do pork, we do beef. What's yeah. Yeah. We
Speaker 5: even had the inquiries for kinsias too, and like, I
Speaker 5: kid you not. And that's kind of where we were.
Speaker 5: And it was we went from like like women's prayer group,
Speaker 5: brunches from Lutheran churches, I kid you not, gentlemen making
Speaker 5: Kish and French toast. I'm like, okay, I'm down. You know,
Speaker 5: this was like a wild back where it's like four
Speaker 5: hundred bucks. Yes, that's gold. Let's do it.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 5: We went from that bum mitswell barments for us, and
Speaker 5: then we had big events and then Melvin Carter, who
Speaker 5: is the first African American mayor in UH Saint Paul
Speaker 5: when he won and he had his big bash party,
Speaker 5: they called us and say, hey, we love you, come
Speaker 5: and do the food. And so we like the catering
Speaker 5: and the private catering scene where you know where y'all
Speaker 5: I was talking about, like that's kind of where we started,
Speaker 5: you know, and that's kind of it wasn't because people
Speaker 5: always asking me like who's your marketing person? Like where
Speaker 5: did you guys go to do? I'm like, bro, Like
Speaker 5: I went from door to door catering events. I would
Speaker 5: go all the time, and I felt like a what's
Speaker 5: you know? My joke was, I felt like a like
Speaker 5: a lady of the night, you know, like you would
Speaker 5: go in and do something special for the client and
Speaker 5: they tell their friends and then I get a call
Speaker 5: next time, goes, hey, the Johnson's call, So you did
Speaker 5: that special thing for them? Like can you do that?
Speaker 5: I'm like, well, what's the budget? And they'll give me
Speaker 5: the budget. I'm like, well, the Johnson's gave me a
Speaker 5: little more like I will take care of you. And
Speaker 5: then you go in and you carry like a few suitcases.
Speaker 5: You come and where do I set up? And you know,
Speaker 5: you do your thing, and then you leave and you
Speaker 5: pay it and you shower and you feel better the
Speaker 5: next day. It kind of you, you know. That's how
Speaker 5: we started. And I even went I did like a
Speaker 5: bachelortte parties too, Like that was one of the weirdest
Speaker 5: one where I did like a private dining cooking scene
Speaker 5: for for but I did know what it was a
Speaker 5: bachelrett party. I walked in like literally I had like
Speaker 5: a few boxes of like the food and stuff. I
Speaker 5: walked in and it's just all women. I'm like, what's
Speaker 5: going on. They're like, oh, yeah, I didn't tell you.
Speaker 5: This is my sister's batchelete party and we wanted you
Speaker 5: to do like a private dinner. And I'm like, oh
Speaker 5: my gosh, Like you guys know, I'm like a cook
Speaker 5: right in the cloth, yeah, the aprons covering everything. Okay,
Speaker 5: I could do the shirt off, but that's gonna be
Speaker 5: a little extra, you know. So that's how we hustled,
Speaker 5: and then we were very blessed. The restaurant grew. Uh
Speaker 5: you know, we we we brought in more people. We
Speaker 5: have incredible operators, we have you know, our you know,
Speaker 5: we had, we grew an executive team. And then when
Speaker 5: it came time to saying, hey, how do we grow?
Speaker 5: I think one of the next growth path was how
Speaker 5: do we expand and build our own restaurant, you know,
Speaker 5: going our own brick and mortar restaurant that is, and
Speaker 5: you know, we have two little guys, but get our
Speaker 5: big guy. We you know, I had to go do
Speaker 5: the song song and pony dance and go to banks
Speaker 5: and find investors. And then that's when it's a gut
Speaker 5: check at you know, of like do you really believe
Speaker 5: in what you're doing? Since when you stand in front,
Speaker 5: like when you go sit with some of these investors
Speaker 5: or potential investors who like write like one hundred fifty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars checks, like you know, they're giving them out
Speaker 5: five bucks for you know, Starbucks or something. You gotta
Speaker 5: like they look at you're like woomy, and you end's
Speaker 5: a gut check of like do you believe in this?
Speaker 1: Do you like?
Speaker 5: It's like yeah, you know, and I said I said
Speaker 5: to uh, I get to talk to a lot among
Speaker 5: high school kids, and I said, in life, you're gonna
Speaker 5: go around in life and there's gonna be these people
Speaker 5: in your life and they're gonna believe in you. They're
Speaker 5: gonna tell you incredible things about yourself. And I'm like,
Speaker 5: think of that as equity, and you put in a
Speaker 5: little piggy bank in your heart and one day there's
Speaker 5: gonna come a moment in your life you gotta break
Speaker 5: that piggy bank and take all that equity and you
Speaker 5: gotta go betting on yourself. Yeah, And that I mean
Speaker 5: that was was like the herd. Like the hardest thing
Speaker 5: was to go and say, oh, this building project is
Speaker 5: a million dollar project and so okay, okay, we gotta go.
Speaker 5: We gotta talk. And when you get in these rooms
Speaker 5: or these guys who are making million dollar deals for
Speaker 5: them or like nothing.
Speaker 1: You'll find out if you're weak or not.
Speaker 5: Yes, And that's when you go, do I believe? And
Speaker 5: that's you know what I draw from. I don't draw
Speaker 5: from yea as confident. I draw from Mom and Dad,
Speaker 5: Like I remember, I think about them, I think about
Speaker 5: all the hard work they put in, Like I think
Speaker 5: about the war. My dad fought. I think about my
Speaker 5: mom being in that war prison camp for a year
Speaker 5: and where she told me that she would pray every
Speaker 5: morning that God would allow her to die because it
Speaker 5: was so horrible in that camp that they had to
Speaker 5: live in. And she said that one day, she said
Speaker 5: that one day I was praying in the morning, she
Speaker 5: said she was this younger. I was praying and I said, God,
Speaker 5: will you let me die today because I can't take
Speaker 5: life here anymore. And she said there was a voice
Speaker 5: inside my heart that says, I can't let you die
Speaker 5: because your children is going to change the world. I
Speaker 5: need you to hold on a little longer because your
Speaker 5: children that you've never met, they're going to change word.
Speaker 5: In the day that I was announced as a folence
Speaker 5: for the James Beard, she called me and told me
Speaker 5: that story. Oh man, I'm crying, you know, on.
Speaker 1: A frying panel.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, gift from God. She kind of just said today,
Speaker 5: when I heard that you were nominated is one of
Speaker 5: the best chefs in the country, I knew why, like
Speaker 5: I needed to keep moving on. So I think about
Speaker 5: I can't wait to see what your brother does. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you could contest this man. You can be the most
Speaker 5: successful whatever in your family. But when you're around your
Speaker 5: uncle's man, they remind you you're ten years old. When
Speaker 5: I freaking when we have like big parties and grills
Speaker 5: and I'm standing by my uncles and they're grilling, They're like,
Speaker 5: let me tell you, kid, how you would do this,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, you know what I end up doing.
Speaker 5: I end up being coming to the dude who holds
Speaker 5: the plate for all them to put the me on.
Speaker 5: And they're all like, let me tell you if you
Speaker 5: want more people in your restaurant, this is what you do.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, I'm I just want to be like, uncle,
Speaker 5: you're here's the deal man you work at like Anderson Windows. Okay,
Speaker 5: I know where you work at. The plant You've don't
Speaker 5: really cooked, but apparently the country has said, I'm pretty
Speaker 5: decent in what I do. But sure, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 5: you have a secret, you know, so you know?
Speaker 2: So, yeah, we can't really overcome the age and the wisdom.
Speaker 1: High prior.
Speaker 5: They make sure they remind you who you are. You
Speaker 5: get reminded, yeah, oh remember when you were five, And
Speaker 5: I'm like, you guys are gonna do that to your nephews. No,
Speaker 5: I will not do you know what well I I
Speaker 5: do because.
Speaker 1: Maybe don't make the mistake of I see people this
Speaker 1: is not this is not like cultural, that's just human human.
Speaker 1: I see people all the time throw out because because
Speaker 1: of not liking something about their parents or how they
Speaker 1: were brought up. They throw the whole thing out.
Speaker 5: I completely understand.
Speaker 1: Instead of just doing a slight tweak.
Speaker 5: Yep, No, I do the same thing. Like my niece
Speaker 5: and nephew. They work out the stay Fair. We have
Speaker 5: a stall to stay Fair in this year. They work
Speaker 5: there and they're from Wisconsin. So they come up and
Speaker 5: they stay up with grandma and grandpa for a week
Speaker 5: and they worked there for two weeks and they work there.
Speaker 5: And I remember I was like harsher on them than
Speaker 5: the other kids, you know, because I was like, dude,
Speaker 5: you guys need a double time, like let's go. And
Speaker 5: I realized I'm like, oh, dude, I sound like my father,
Speaker 5: like like when we're working, you know, he's just like, hey,
Speaker 5: like I need you to, you know, keep working at it.
Speaker 5: And I believe in allowing kids to struggle a little bit,
Speaker 5: you know when they're working, you know, because I really
Speaker 5: want to be like, where's the creativity to you know,
Speaker 5: figure things out. And I think we worked out with
Speaker 5: our chefs too, you know, like allow them a little
Speaker 5: a little line to struggle.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, I'm way more like, I'm way more
Speaker 1: financially comfortable than I ever thought I would be. And
Speaker 1: I worry constantly about my kids being too soft all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: You know it's like, yeah, you wound up over not
Speaker 1: overdoing it, but you just worry about them being like
Speaker 1: do you have the ger?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 1: Am I like depriving you of the ger?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's a weird thing that it's like this first world
Speaker 4: problem that you had to think about because when you're
Speaker 4: you know, your dad, he didn't think any other way
Speaker 4: other than like, I don't want my kid to struggle
Speaker 4: the way I did. I need to find him a
Speaker 4: better place. We grew up in a place where life
Speaker 4: was pretty darn easy in our circumstances, I believe, you know,
Speaker 4: speaking from you know, most of.
Speaker 1: Us relative from a global perspective exactly.
Speaker 4: So you have to then think about how are you
Speaker 4: going to instill that to your kid because they're not
Speaker 4: seeing a struggle like the way you saw your dad struggle.
Speaker 5: You know. Yeah, but I also think too that one
Speaker 5: of the things that I love, like one of the
Speaker 5: things I get to do I love to do is
Speaker 5: there's a lot of high schools up in the Twin
Speaker 5: Cities area that are, like, you know, they have a
Speaker 5: higher population of monk kids. And so I get asked
Speaker 5: to come in as a speaker, and I and I
Speaker 5: the thing that I love doing is like I love
Speaker 5: looking them in the eyes. Where it's like a big auditorums,
Speaker 5: like three hundred kids and you see the group of
Speaker 5: like fifty monk kids, and I look them in the
Speaker 5: eyes and I said, hey, guys, like I'm like to
Speaker 5: all my like white brothers and sisters and friends out there,
Speaker 5: like I'm gonna put you guys on pause. So I'm
Speaker 5: just talking directly to among brothers and sisters, and I say,
Speaker 5: here's the deal. Your your grandfather and your father's they
Speaker 5: fought a war, and they they they fought a war
Speaker 5: that wasn't their war, but they fought it with honor.
Speaker 5: And then when a promise was made that they would
Speaker 5: have free passage to America for fighting for America, it
Speaker 5: was denying for them. They still got to America and
Speaker 5: they worked here and they worked for years and years
Speaker 5: and years to get you where you are. And so
Speaker 5: anytime you feel like you can't do something, or anytime
Speaker 5: you feel like, oh, I don't think I'm like strong enough,
Speaker 5: you remember that the blood that pumps through their vein
Speaker 5: is the same blood that pumps through your heart, you know,
Speaker 5: And to remember, I mean, I think that that's one
Speaker 5: of the biggest thing is like remember where you come from.
Speaker 5: And for me, that was a big big part of Look, man,
Speaker 5: the restaurant industry isn't easy. It sucks, you know. And
Speaker 5: I was explaining to one of our one of our
Speaker 5: workers or you know, one of the kids that work
Speaker 5: with us, about how for the restaurant the profit margin
Speaker 5: is like eight percent and if you're a really good year,
Speaker 5: you get ten, you know, and that's like a really
Speaker 5: good year. And she was like, what what do you
Speaker 5: mean by that. I'm like, so, imagine if you did
Speaker 5: something and you got one hundred dollars and all I
Speaker 5: said is you can only keep eight dollars. And she's
Speaker 5: like that sucks. I'm like, yeah, that's the restaurant. And
Speaker 5: it hit her. She was like a younger college kid
Speaker 5: and she's like, oh my gosh, really I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you know, and.
Speaker 8: So so You're like, so, now let's circle back to
Speaker 8: the fact that you threw that shanks and trash.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's like it's like or I get people there like, oh,
Speaker 5: it's it's so amazing what you do. I get young
Speaker 5: monk kids that come up bless their heart, like I
Speaker 5: want to be a chef, and I'm like, and I
Speaker 5: do the Billy Madison scene, you know, where you like
Speaker 5: you squeeze your face, you know, talking about where you're like,
Speaker 5: don't say that, stay where you are. Never grow up, Billy.
Speaker 5: I want to go to high school too, you know.
Speaker 5: And and that's how I feel. But then again, there
Speaker 5: is this thing of like, man, there's just something about
Speaker 5: the grind and the grit that happens in my heart
Speaker 5: and especially and that's what one of the things I
Speaker 5: love about being Mung and being able to talk to
Speaker 5: younger monk kids where it's like you're gonna struggle, it's
Speaker 5: gonna sock your mate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's American elbow grease, dude, but yeah it's mung
Speaker 1: elbow grease.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And I don't And that's my big thing. Man.
Speaker 5: I love talking to people about it where I'm like,
Speaker 5: this isn't among thing only, this is a human thing.
Speaker 5: This is a human thing. Like yeah, you're parents did
Speaker 5: great things, universal human thing. Yeah, but yeah, but it's
Speaker 5: select few. Yeah, but you know, but even what was saying,
Speaker 5: how like how you guys are just like, hey, you
Speaker 5: you guys, you know your parents set you up for
Speaker 5: a little bit better, you know, but you guys still
Speaker 5: worked hard where you are. It wasn't like Okay, now
Speaker 5: I'm just gonna play with all this like no, like
Speaker 5: you guys worked and then being able to pass that
Speaker 5: down too, you know, and I think that man, like
Speaker 5: we got a little more like yeah, and I we
Speaker 5: got a little bit more you know, heads up and
Speaker 5: more step up, you know from where our parents are.
Speaker 5: And you know, I don't have any kids, but one day,
Speaker 5: you know, when I do, like my kids will have
Speaker 5: a little bit thirty nine married.
Speaker 1: Now what's going on there?
Speaker 5: Man?
Speaker 1: Is that? Like is your mom and dad bummed about that?
Speaker 5: Bro'? That's a whole new surely one. I'm the only
Speaker 5: one in my family that's not married. Everyone's married and
Speaker 5: has kids. My parents have twenty one grandkids. So they
Speaker 5: love it, you know. They they love being grandparents.
Speaker 1: Tell tell them I'm too busy making you proud.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: But in our culture, though, what what makes family, probably
Speaker 5: the culture is raising a family, having a family, having lineage,
Speaker 5: having you know.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 5: So that's that every three to four weeks, my mom
Speaker 5: gives me the talk. I get it, and I don't.
Speaker 5: I don't push it away. I know that she gets
Speaker 5: to this point where she's a little older now, so
Speaker 5: she's nervous, like I want to instill everything I have
Speaker 5: to you if something was to happen when she had
Speaker 5: some health scare, you know. And so I get it.
Speaker 5: I listen to it. It's about a twenty minute speech.
Speaker 5: It's the same it's usually on a phone call. I'm
Speaker 5: driving into work. It's the same one she gives every
Speaker 5: three to four weeks. And I listen and I say, yes, mom,
Speaker 5: mm hmm, yep, yep, great. And then sometimes she'll be like, wait,
Speaker 5: we have some cousins, we have some daughters that are
Speaker 5: coming to visit from Michigan. They're at the house, like
Speaker 5: your dad and I would love some fish. She'll bring
Speaker 5: some fish over and I'm like, I know what you're doing,
Speaker 5: you know, and stuff like that. But I mean, I
Speaker 5: get it. It comes from a good heart, you know,
Speaker 5: both of them. It comes to your good heart, and
Speaker 5: so I totally get it.
Speaker 1: Oh, tell us before we wrap up, tell us about
Speaker 1: your show.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, we got this show called Farah. It's
Speaker 5: an outdoor you guys might have heard that channel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: And you know, one of the craziest things was about
Speaker 5: two and a half years ago, Patrick, one of the producers,
Speaker 5: came up and goes, hey, I have an idea, bro.
Speaker 5: And he calls me up and we've been doing a
Speaker 5: few TV stuff for like Food Network, and then we
Speaker 5: were very blessed to be able to do this thing
Speaker 5: with Netflix with Iron Chef, and so he's like, I
Speaker 5: have an idea. It's kind of crazy, but let me
Speaker 5: pitch it to you. And he's like, this idea is
Speaker 5: that you're going to travel the country. You're the host
Speaker 5: of the show. You travel the country and we find
Speaker 5: either invasive animals, animals that are destroying their ecosystem, or
Speaker 5: animals that most people just won't eat. And we're gonna
Speaker 5: go out with the guide. We're gonna hunt them, and
Speaker 5: I will go outside and well, you know, in the
Speaker 5: area where we hunt them, we set up a grill
Speaker 5: and we set a little mini kitchen and you cook
Speaker 5: out there, and I'm like, the first thing I said
Speaker 5: to him was like, Dude, this show is so mung
Speaker 5: it's not even funny. The idea that we're just growing
Speaker 5: on the wild to find some kind of creature, hunt
Speaker 5: them down and cook it. I'm like, are you freaking
Speaker 5: kidding me? I'm like, what if this show, Like you know,
Speaker 5: at that point, we didn't know if the show is
Speaker 5: will be picked up or not. I'm like, if this
Speaker 5: show gets picked up, every Mung uncle and cousin will
Speaker 5: be like, dude, like that's the show. And so they
Speaker 5: said yeah, So we ran like a testing and Outdoor
Speaker 5: came back. God. We won eight episodes as Rocket and
Speaker 5: then in one calendar year they Greenly had three three seasons.
Speaker 5: So we just got done filming season three. Season one
Speaker 5: was released last fall, and then season two will be
Speaker 5: released in December.
Speaker 1: How many episodes are you make in per release?
Speaker 5: See eight? And Man, I had this I'm a small
Speaker 5: Wisconsin boy, right, I'm just from Wisconsin. I had this
Speaker 5: moment where I had this like come to Jesus moment
Speaker 5: where I'm like I'm like literally chest deep in chocolate
Speaker 5: milk water in Oklahoma City area, noodling for catfish. And
Speaker 5: I just thought to myself, Man, if you would have
Speaker 5: told me this twenty years ago, eighteen year old kid
Speaker 5: going off to college going, hey, one day, You're like,
Speaker 5: you're gonna be doing this cameras around and I was
Speaker 5: just like, college leads to this, Yeah, stay in school kids,
Speaker 5: But it was like you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 5: I was like, I don't know if you if you
Speaker 5: guys ever had that like surreal moment like whoa what
Speaker 5: am I doing here? Like this is so amazing and
Speaker 5: and yeah, and then you know, and the guy, you know, Nate,
Speaker 5: was like, oh right, I'll get your hand in there
Speaker 5: and let's go looking for fish. I'm like, okay, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: but man, it's such a should you should talk about
Speaker 5: some of the critters that are on Oh season one. Yeah,
Speaker 5: season one we did we went that's all that whole
Speaker 5: season's out. Yeah yeah, yeah, season one we went all out.
Speaker 5: So we uh first, uh we went wild hogs. You
Speaker 5: know that. That was really really fun. A Burmese python
Speaker 5: with a guy named Dusty Crumb. Dusty Crumb you can
Speaker 5: find him on the History Channel and you know, he's
Speaker 5: got a few other little shows down there. And then
Speaker 5: we had iguanas, which was the iguana was really special
Speaker 5: for me because I showed my dad and say, hey, Dad,
Speaker 5: we're gonna go hunt iguanas. And he goes, oh, we
Speaker 5: just hunt those as boys, really yeah, and so I'm like,
Speaker 5: really yeah, on the trees, we see them all the time,
Speaker 5: we hunt them, we shoot him and he said that
Speaker 5: they had these like little twenty two guns, like like
Speaker 5: they're like they're like a one loader type thing, and
Speaker 5: it's like basically it's like a stick, you know. And
Speaker 5: he's like, and I was thinking to myself, how did
Speaker 5: you guys, aim Do you know what I'm saying, because
Speaker 5: it's like it's barely a gun, right, It's a stick
Speaker 5: with the little like firing pin that you just hit,
Speaker 5: you know. And he goes, yeah, that's what we used
Speaker 5: to do. And then he told me the recipe they used,
Speaker 5: and it was awesome to be down in southern Florida
Speaker 5: hunting iguana. After we killed the iguanas to cook it
Speaker 5: the same way my father cooked it in the mountains
Speaker 5: of Laos like seventy years ago. Where I'm like, dude,
Speaker 5: this is so amazing. It was so special for me
Speaker 5: and be on national TV and being able to say yep,
Speaker 5: dad did this seventy years ago. In Mountains of Laus,
Speaker 5: we did a carp with bow lionfish, lion fish school.
Speaker 5: Oh man, yeah, lionfish. That was all. I didn't do
Speaker 5: the scuba diving because I'm not screw scuba servitified. But
Speaker 5: they thought it'd be fun to put It's always a
Speaker 5: thing I found out. Producers think it's fun to put
Speaker 5: a big guy in a wetsuit and just do like
Speaker 5: a fifteen minute segment of like funny goofy movie. I
Speaker 5: mean trying to squeeze into a wetsuit. Sure, so I
Speaker 5: squeezed into wetsuit, got into the water, and we were
Speaker 5: in Destined, Florida, and they were like our captain that
Speaker 5: was taking us. He's like, I don't know why you
Speaker 5: put the wetsuit on his Like we tried agrees in.
Speaker 5: I looked at our producer. I thought it was funny,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, screw you, dude, are you seriously I like,
Speaker 5: I'm sweating into this wet suit, right, I'm a big dude.
Speaker 5: He's like, yeah, I just thought it would be funny.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know you didn't need it, and I
Speaker 5: was like, oh, trusting your producers, that's what happens. Uh.
Speaker 5: They learned that in producers school. Yeah, it's like we're
Speaker 5: what what kind of positions? We put him over the
Speaker 5: brim python I went to catch and it bit me,
Speaker 5: you know, and so I guess that I guess are
Speaker 5: one of our producers says like after the outdoor guys
Speaker 5: saw that, they're like, dude, that got a season two,
Speaker 5: get bit more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now now that's like
Speaker 5: the funny thing, you know where I'm like, oh, that's
Speaker 5: just trying not to get bitten, you know, Like we
Speaker 5: did one up one season we did Alligator Guard and
Speaker 5: it wasn't dead yet when we pulled it on you know,
Speaker 5: the shot in the head. But we pulled it on
Speaker 5: the boat. It wasn't dead yet. So I'm like, you know,
Speaker 5: the camera guys and want our camera guys like getting
Speaker 5: near it like kind of you know. I'm like yeah,
Speaker 5: and then they're like snap back, and I'm like, screw
Speaker 5: your guys, you know. So that's kind of the fun
Speaker 5: thing where it's like, how can we make a scream? Yeah?
Speaker 5: And the and what else we have, we have, yeah,
Speaker 5: we had. That was really fun. And then season two
Speaker 5: was you know, really fun. And that one we did,
Speaker 5: uh we did white tail because up in kind of
Speaker 5: northern outside a little bit half an hour north of Minneapolis,
Speaker 5: this you know, just the population of dough control with
Speaker 5: a white tail. So that was a suburban environment. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: And so uh, you know, I I grew up in Lacrosse,
Speaker 5: Wisconsin college there, and so I got to know the
Speaker 5: matt McPherson, the Matthews family, you know, Matthews bo. So
Speaker 5: we were able to use one of their bows and
Speaker 5: it is like the first time I've ever you know,
Speaker 5: and I had a crash course in bow, and I
Speaker 5: was just like, after you get done shooting a Matthew,
Speaker 5: I'm like, I don't know if I want to go
Speaker 5: back to anything else, you know. And so it was
Speaker 5: like really fun just to go and learn the whole
Speaker 5: system with bow. And you know, I grew up hunting
Speaker 5: and fishing, but by no means an expert. And that's
Speaker 5: what makes the show really fun. Is like the first
Speaker 5: half of the show is like I'm fish out of water,
Speaker 5: you know, a guy takes me in, I'm going and
Speaker 5: then what I've been told is what the producers really
Speaker 5: love is the fact that the second end of the show,
Speaker 5: it's a reversal. So the guide he you know, they
Speaker 5: cooked what you know, they do, you know, and then
Speaker 5: I get to, you know, show them like, you know,
Speaker 5: what I would do with you know, with the meat
Speaker 5: or with the animal. And I think one of the
Speaker 5: funnest ones was a central Wisconsin area kind of near
Speaker 5: my hometown. We we went beaver trapping, never done it before,
Speaker 5: and man, like, beaver's are just just a big old
Speaker 5: freaking yellow teeth looking back at you, and you're like,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh, you know, and they're like, oh, go
Speaker 5: pull that out. And I'm like pulling this thing out.
Speaker 5: It's just like thick fur.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh yeah, nothing better.
Speaker 5: And then we broke it down and like we ate it.
Speaker 5: I'm like, this is delicious, but I love it, you know,
Speaker 5: but it's just I mean, it's a big rodent, you know,
Speaker 5: and you're just like, Okay, here we go, you know.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean we have some We shot season
Speaker 5: three and then hopefully we'll hear back about season four.
Speaker 5: But it's a really really fun show. We just came
Speaker 5: out on they have it streaming now on my outdoor TV.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 5: There's like this other show I see on there too,
Speaker 5: call me Eater something like that. Every time I go
Speaker 5: on there, you know, there's a picture of some.
Speaker 8: Guys the hotel room, uh, driving into a town a
Speaker 8: couple of weeks ago, and she's liked, well, what email?
Speaker 8: And I gave her the email, which is at the
Speaker 8: Meat Eater, and she immediately started laughing.
Speaker 5: And I was like, Nope, that's what it is. She okay.
Speaker 5: It's like it's like, why is it? Seymour butts at me?
Speaker 5: Wait are you serious, sir?
Speaker 1: You know, so tell people how to find you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have the restaurant.
Speaker 5: Yea restaurant is at Union Munk Kitchen. It's a Union
Speaker 5: Munk Kitchen yep. So uh you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: on Instagram all those other platforms. And then me is
Speaker 5: for me, it's at yea Vang seven.
Speaker 1: Zero, got it? And then outdoor Channel, Oh yeah, outdoor
Speaker 1: Channel my outdoor TV app.
Speaker 5: Yep, my outdoor TV app. It's like great man first,
Speaker 5: was it first thirty days or free or something? There?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know, you're coming over for dinner night,
Speaker 1: you know, about that.
Speaker 5: Well, Karan said something about it. Well, I was just
Speaker 5: trying to be cool about it. You know. Do you
Speaker 5: know how many friends text me goes, dude, what are
Speaker 5: you doing in Bozman? And I'm like, ah, stuff, And
Speaker 5: then and then somebody goes, is it you're going to
Speaker 5: go with me? And you were Stephen in the Boys
Speaker 5: And I'm like, oh, maybe, and then they're all like
Speaker 5: freaking out a little bit. So I'm like, dude, just
Speaker 5: be cool. Man.
Speaker 1: Well, hope you did a good enough job.
Speaker 5: You'll have to just hold the plate as Steve Grill and.
Speaker 1: I got grill. It's home cooking right now. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: already cooking.
Speaker 5: That's awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're gonna have some chips, potato chips. Oh yeah, is.
Speaker 5: This Montana culture you're teaching me?
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for coming out, man, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thanks for having me man. It's awesome. It's awesome
Speaker 5: to be here man. And it's my first time Bozman,
Speaker 5: so Jordan and I first time Bozeman. We got a
Speaker 5: chance to well welcome, enjoy the.
Speaker 1: Mountains and yeah, Yang, thanks for coming out man. Of course, Boner,
Speaker 1: I'll see you. I'll see you at Youth turk.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: You know where I'll be. Am.
Speaker 5: I invited to dinner too, You.
Speaker 1: Are inviting dinner.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they're looking forward to it.
Speaker 1: I get that high, feel that youth turkey again.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, dog said, if I came for the
Speaker 4: first time of my girls, he give me that spot.
Speaker 5: No, no, no, he did.
Speaker 1: I'll call, I'll take care of it.
Speaker 5: I'll let you know.
Speaker 1: I know what he says. All right, thanks, guys, Thanks.
Speaker 5: Oh see you Gray shine like silver in the sun.
Speaker 5: Ride ride, ride on alone of Sweetheart. We're done beat
Speaker 5: this damp horse to death, so taking a new one
Speaker 5: and ride away.
Speaker 1: We're done beat this damn horse today, so take a
Speaker 1: new one and ride on.