Meet The $10,000,000 Chef Who Beat Popeyes | Joshua Weissman

Josh Weissman has completely changed the restaurant industry by taking everything they do and then making it better and cheaper today we're getting an inside look on the secrets of the restaurant industry they definitely do illegal [ __ ] in that in that world how you're able to make the best meals on a budget and how he was able to turn his passion for cooking into a multi-million dollar business but first we gotta thank our sponsor Aura as you might have noticed a lot of our guests have always talked about the importance of getting a good night of sleep and I always thought that I was sleeping just fine until Aura sent me their sleep tracking ring and then I realized how bad of a sleeper I guess I am and how many times I'm waking up in the middle of the night so being able to track my sleep has been incredibly important and now I know exactly how much sleep I need when I'm most likely to wake up and how I could optimize that just to feel better during the day see I always knew I was a bad sleeper but finally I can have a log of when I wake up throughout the night and how I can improve on my sleep and since I've got the aura ring and been able to track these stats I've been able to drastically improve my sleep there are hundreds of studies out there that directly correlate good sleep with product activity but good sleep is a lot more complicated than the hours from when you lay down until the time you wake up sleep is broken down into four different stages and Aura gives you a detailed breakdown of how much each stage you're getting and what you could do to improve they also track your heart rate heart rate variability and oxygen levels when you sleep or also has tons of other cool features like activity tracking temperature variations and more so check out Aura with the link Down Below in the description thank you so much or for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast enjoy welcome back to the iced coffee hour I'm Joshua Weissman and I cook food welcome what brings you out to Vegas I was doing a little cooking thing with uh I don't know if you guys know Jean George uh he's like a huge so I mean a juggernaut in the chef's space this guy's on I don't even know how he's managed to do what he does but he has multiple Michelin star restaurants he has like 50 or 60 restaurants now I studied him a bunch when I was a kid and they randomly reached out I was like hey John George like watches you you want to hang out and like do some stuff and so we came out and filmed the video it was super fun can you tell us about the video Yeah Yeah so basically the concept was can I beat a Michelin Chef uh so we did like chopping competitions and like a bunch of other things and we made like a plate I had to like come up with a dish he he got to use one of the dishes that was already at the restaurant so I felt a little disadvantaged there but I came with a dish and like put it together and we went head to head and you'll have to watch the video to see what happens who judges that though uh we had uh a bunch of blindfolded taste testers come in and pick a dish it was a steak dish how do you think you did going into it like before I got there yeah before well before he got judged like after he made the meal ah you know I hate to say it because everybody's usually like God Josh has a big e oh you're right I walked in feeling just fine but you know I think that I will say that I think that there is an element to like being successful in a scenario like that right in the same way with athletes too right I'm not saying that I'm you know back to like an athlete if I can run like two minutes and I'm done but I think the mentality aspect helps me do well in scenarios like that you know high pressure but um I don't know I felt fine I felt like I was going to do well I didn't know if I would win or not but I didn't really care because it's like this guy's been cooking professionally and has had his own restaurant an entire Restaurant Group for like 50 years so how old is this guy he's 60. okay and what does it mean Michelin star what is I I always hear it but I have honestly no idea what that means really yeah so it's kind of a it's kind of a weird mysterious thing so we know Michelin tires it comes from the tire company guys is it real sorry it does it does it does it's 100 the exact same company so I will say that there's a little bit of a weird element to it but I think it took off where Michelin started a guide where they're like okay we sell tires we want to incentivize selling tires this is my assumption in their boardroom meeting here and they say they decided okay well we'll make a system where we'll give a bunch of recommendations of great places to eat and bed and breakfast and whatnot for you to stop at a longer trip using Michelin tires no and that was kind of the the whole element of it but it became its own thing so this is why I still respect it to an extent it became its own thing because people started Desiring these sort of unattainable ratings where it was like one two three stars right and then it kind of fell into fine dining where it was you know one star is just for great food two stars is great food and great service three stars is like everything it's like the Symphony of a restaurant being utterly perfect from the bottom to the top someone drops a napkin it gets picked up within a certain amount of time if somebody like you know the forks and knives are always placed in the right spot every single time um did the waiter a waitress check on you and when they checked on you how did they check on you and like it that's just a fraction of the level of intricacy that they look for um and so it ended up becoming this really sort of difficult to acquire award and human beings love that so uh you know everybody's like oh well I want a Michelin star I'd love to have one as well so I mean I get it have you been to a three Michelin star restaurant yes uh I've been to a couple different ones there's one I don't know if they still have three stars there's one in San Francisco called Cezanne so expensive yeah yeah how much easily eat without drinks like 750 a person no 750 I'm pretty sure yeah I'm pretty I'm pretty sure they're the most expensive Michelin restaurant in America because most on I think their average tab is like a thousand person or something like that person yeah what do you get for a thousand dollars I mean it depends on where you go but with oh with Cezanne um yeah so I mean you're gonna get like multiple multiple courses not five courses or six courses probably closer to 12 or maybe even 15 you might be dining for three or four hours are you serious your ass will get sweaty I'll tell you right now can I say that on the spot yeah it's okay uh great news so yeah I mean some of these restaurants actually have rest areas so you'll go in and I I love it personally it is God is what it is it is honestly really fun what this is it's kind of like a spa you know you go to a spa right and it's kind of unnecessarily catered to you in a way where it's like they lift your arm and do everything for you and they lift your arm for you no no no no no I'm I'm I'm bringing up the concept of a spot imagine imagine the server just chewing the food board and then they baby yeah yeah exactly exactly and then they give you like a gift card now um so the concept is like you're catered to and every women in most scenarios so like there are some places where you'd go and you'd eat for maybe an hour and then they'd go okay cool now you're gonna go over to the Espresso Bar so I'll move you over this rest area there's some couches like really nice modern couches maybe they have like something to read or whatever they give you a small espresso and then maybe like a juice or something refreshing sit there for about 10 minutes then they'll escort you back to your table and then your tables reset with different plates and different silverware for the next set of courses like it's like high high high fine dining how often do people go to a restaurant like that is that like a once a month sort of deal if you have the money or is like once a year that sounds exhausting to me yeah I think it's more of like something you go and do every once in a while you know you go go-karting every once in a while you go to the fancy restaurant every once in a while so our most three-star Michelin restaurants like that where they have rest areas or is that just a one-off I would say that's a that's not most of them okay most of them are like you know they're restaurants but they're just really really high level food or really high level Cuisine there's usually other elements to it though I mean another comparison I could make is um I remember the name of it 11 Madison are you guys familiar with it yeah yeah it's actually one of the largest three Michelin star restaurants in the world typically higher quality less seats they want consistency they're going to have less seats most Michelin restaurants are like 40 seats and under because they just don't want to deal with like having to do food like that yeah 11 has like a couple like I think 150 200 something like that they have 70 people on the line 70 people or it might be 50 or 70 something like that some ridiculous amount yeah of people that are cooking but their experience is very much like catered to you like sometimes I think one of my friends went and his dad is like knows the community there pretty well he went in and they were talking about F1 and they were having their meal and it was based off the menu nothing too crazy and it was like a like a 10 course menu or something like that all vegetables and the waiter overheard them talking about F1 and so for their dessert they got a bunch of F1 inspired desserts and then got a F1 cookie of like a bunch of F1 cars like as a gift to leave with in a little gift bag isn't that the place where they like they ask you about yourself and you tell them like your interests or whatever and then they can because I swear I heard about a Michelin star restaurant that will like go figure out your interest so they know that they can converse with you about certain topics I've actually never eaten at 11. I'm I'm only talking about someone else's experience I'm not 100 sure but I mean sure I wouldn't be surprised if they did that but the point is like each experience is going to be different depending on the restaurant you go to you know some places might have a rest area some places might just be a restaurant and the food is insane you know the French Laundry you go and you eat you leave but they usually give you like gifts and stuff like that when you leave and how much do the employees make do you know at these nothing really yeah I mean you know I I'm gonna kind of get in the conversation of experience is is you know what I mean I back in the day when I was working you know as a young line cook I would have taken pretty much any pay to work at any of these places and that's how most people feel but you'll find that there's not a ton of people that are able to do that because affordability right a lot of the people that are working at these places have one of two or three things either one they have good friends that they can sleep on their couch and stuff like that two they have money saved up and they can pay rent or or maybe they are paid well it's getting better there are places that pay enough to afford rent but third the higher the restaurant some sometimes they'll pay much less than you could imagine and most people can't afford rent uh like I wanted to work at this one restaurant the champion named uh this was years and years and years ago um three Michelin star in San Francisco and they actually gave me a job offer because one of my old chefs knew them and he was like oh this guy's talented like he likes your restaurant you should consider him and they gave me an offer but they were like well first you need to stash and stashing is like a unpaid internship you come in for like a day or two and show them what you got and then you leave and then they decide if they're gonna hire you right they said the stage is two months two months no pay zero they wanted me to work four days a week and stage two months in San Francisco as a line cook how is that legal they just call it something different like an internship I have no clue okay I have no clue they definitely do illegal [ __ ] in that in that world okay it is getting better and it's been getting cracked down on I would say okay so that's the good part um but yeah so that gives you an example of kind of like what most of the people are going to be getting paid anywhere from 12 to maybe 17 an hour wow but the servers make probably a lot right because they're tips yeah sometimes they share tips but it's rare if they're not sharing tips then yeah servers make Bank service can make six figures yeah pretty pretty easily yeah we know a few servers here on the Strip who would easily make about 150 maybe as high as 200 000 a year just working at a really high-end restaurant some of the tabs are insane we went out to dinner last night I'm not gonna share where but uh you know where but the table across from us got a 5300 bottle the 5300 bottle of sake just one bottle fifty three hundred dollars that's insane yeah so you can imagine the tip on top of that plus Food Plus other drinks plus everything else just two people yeah especially if it's like a large party that's when it gets crazy in some of these restaurants one of the restaurants I worked at there was uh I think it was like a 20 top that came in so 20 20 seats 20 people sitting in seats um and they ordered all of the most expensive [ __ ] and the most expensive bottles of like wine and champagne let me tell you something whatever you're paying for champagne and wine at these restaurants is like five to six hundred percent of what it actually is there was a bottle uh one of the restaurants that were and I like I like the champagne but it's sold at the grocery store for well actually I'll tell you what we sold it for first all right so the restaurant sold it for 75 a bottle which is like not exorbitant that's affordable for some people but at the store it's at twelve dollars twelve dollars at the store selling it for 75 so but um is that why they charge the corkage fees so if you bring your own in yes okay so bring your own wine in a lot of times yeah yeah and they'll charge corkage fees so they're usually like 30 bucks so it could be more than the cost it would take just does that go for a bottle or is that like per table it's like if you bring in like three bottles I believe it's per bottle yeah wrong yeah so it's worth it if you bring in a really expensive bottle like a 500 bottle then you'll save a lot of money most restaurants are profitable are profitable because of alcohol that's why most of them I'm not saying that that's the only reason I'm just saying that the reason why they pass over margins and get like at least a decent payout is alcohol because food is tough to make profitable it's very hard you have to balance your menu there's like how much is your food cost what's your overhead etc etc how long does it take to make some of these things a lot of fine dining places uh are not profitable like there's a lot of michelin-starred restaurants that are not profitable but there's just somebody who has a lot of money that owns it wow but you know what before we go into that I want to say a huge thank you to our sponsor of stream yard you know in the beginning stages when it comes to making content one of the best ways to figure out what works is to create as much as possible and reducing that time is essential so you have more time left over to figure out what works best well thankfully stream yard is one of the best ways to produce high quality content right from your browser streamyard is a live streaming Studio platform perfect for people looking to get into content creation without having to worry about all the editing setup and post-production that comes with it you can stream directly to Facebook YouTube LinkedIn and several other platforms they also make it easy to brand and customize your videos before you even go live in addition to that they allow you to multi-stream social media platforms so you can maximize your content's reach whether you want to start live streaming or just easily record new content stream yard makes it simple to get polished and professional content every single time so if you want to get started but you don't want to waste countless hours on production setup and editing we couldn't recommend stream yard anymore so get started for free today by using the link Down Below in the description and start creating high quality content as soon as you finish the podcast of course so again the link is down below in the description and now let's get back to this podcast let's talk a little bit about your personal background and your experience with being a chef where did you first find interest in cooking and uh yeah a little bit about the timeline yeah you know it's funny I I feel like a lot of people don't believe me but I started cooking when I was like four like four or five probably like legitimately cooking regularly my mom brought me and my mom cooks a lot she's from the south you know chicken fried steak and she's making ribs and she's making cream gravy and this and stuff and you know she's amazing really a very very very talented cook uh and so that interested me it was the one place I could go and make a mess there's one place I could go make a mess and just kind of like you know pick up a knife and Shop in in what other scenario as a kid can you do that right everywhere else everybody tells you no but the kitchen's the one place you could do that so that was exciting to me um so I started doing that for a little bit and my mom could tell I took interest in it so she kept kind of like fueling the fire she gave me a little knife she gave me like a cutting board and um I think at around 10 I was like this is definitely my thing because I was good at it pretty much right out the gate um and it's funny I feel like especially now actually like 10 year olds are very self-conscious about what they're going to be doing and what they're going to be I don't know if you guys have like interviewed a 10 year old but not yet but like been around kids though where they're talking like you know my my fiance's uh cousins and stuff and and uh nieces and nephews like the way that they talk I'm like they're really stressed out about their future you're like 10 bro um I was as well and so to me I was like I'm not good at a lot of other things I'm really good at this this is definitely my thing and from then on I had decided I was like I'm gonna figure out how to make this into something um that is good so by 10 you had that figured out yeah what was it about cooking that Drew you to that I think it was it was the element of something that I knew that I was way better at adults and I knew you know my the age Gap my mind kind of went there I think that there's something here and I want to be good at something and I wasn't good at video games thank god um and that was like the main draws that I enjoyed it so much and there was never a time that I was bored and I was good at it and I knew that then and I was I think I didn't want to waste time trying to look for something else like oh is there something better out there my mind was like I could do this forever and always be happy so why would I do anything how did your parents Foster that growth were they encouraging of you like making your own lunch or cooking dinners that's a good question they were extremely supportive I mean I mean you kind of behooved them right because I cooked them dinner like every night but I didn't love that yeah but I'll give I'll give you some examples as to how they nurtured it though because they definitely did like more so than they had to they spent a lot of money on like unnecessary expensive things like kitchen knives and fanciest equipment that I use like once and then threw in the garage I was like oh cool a weird little juicer thing and then never used it again on my 16th birthday you know got my license and all that and I I asked they're like oh what do you want what do you want to get you know for your 16th birthday and I was like I just want like a whole pig and my mom was like no absolutely not like not I mean she was like cool with it in the sense of I guess but she really didn't want to deal with it she's like all right let me see if I can find something else my dad went ahead and got it and then so she didn't know and I'm like in the kitchen and my mom walked there's like six or seven p.m my mom was like out doing other stuff she comes in and I'm like Midway like with a bone saw no cutting the leg off this pig it's dead for the record everybody just so you know um you buy a pig like a full form Pig yeah at all or no it's well usually okay yeah usually it would be you can't uh Magic just plop it down like from an animal Butchery standpoint you cannot show up with like an un taken care of pig because like you have to kind of like get that stuff out of there you don't want to look outside yeah so it was already like gutted and everything and like the hair was like but not torched off no is it the hair was torched off yeah so it was like burnt and it was bald it's like a naked giant naked mole rat gutted yeah basically and that was your 16th birthday present yeah yeah um but why did you want a pig so I wanted to learn how to do whole animal Butchery I think you know at 16 I had done a lot of research by then 10 at from 10 to 16 I was like doing exorbitant amounts of research I bought every book I could possibly buy I read every single one of them several times I tried as many I probably cooked like geez like two or three different things out of a book every day from 10 to 16. um I say every day you know maybe there were a couple days where I didn't but the point is it was it was a lot uh and I realized I was like man how are people you know butchering these animals Google it well animal Butchery oh cool there's all this information well how am I supposed to put this to you so that a whole pig that was basically it whole Pig's expensive it was like a thousand dollars a thousand dollars for a pickup it was like a Heritage breed home why do you need a Heritage breed hog is that just like a better quality meat yeah way better quality meat um and then also just like I don't know sustained ability and I I don't know if you're gonna like break down a whole pig do you really want like a quality pig or do you want like the nice stuff you know some nice high quality flavor good intramuscular fat and all that stuff how do you cook such a big pig is there like a special I'm curious about that you can't put that gram is really in with that in the oven I'm just trying to visualize yeah you just slap that [ __ ] in the oven and it's done yeah no you can't I'm just completely you cannot oh dude this thing would take up this whole table have you you cannot hear I'll tell you this you can't pick this thing up by yourself unless you're you're really strong it's like carrying a dead body not that I know what that's like yeah for the record so how did you cut it did you put it on a table and like yeah so I had to take two huge actually it was I took four huge um like but you know those Butcher Block boards the really big ones yeah and like basically shingled them all together put the pig on it and then you know I you know I have to kind of like break all the limbs down take the legs take the head all the other things and then you start breaking down the Primal cuts of meat which like those really big pizzas so pork chop comes from a whole Primal cut of meat it's like an entire um like there's multiple chines of Bones and it's like this entire roast that you slice pork chops from yeah same thing with beef that's basically it so I broke it down into like different cuts and we got my parents had to buy a chest freezer to put it all in there so you can see how supportive they were I mean like most parents in that scenario would be like no absolutely not so they dealt with a lot for me uh to make that happen was that hard for you at all to like like actually be visually seeing like because personally for me I know if I had to like kill or like look at the food me too before it was actually just a stake on my plate I know it sounds so terrible I know a lot of people also like feel this way I wouldn't be able to eat it all right totally I don't think so I totally get it I've seen the pig the pig head yeah and seeing the meat too I can't do it because I see the pig yeah it's it's funny I think that makes complete sense I think that's also like a very natural human reaction I also felt that way but it's sort of like you have a goal and you're gonna grind to get to that goal and so my my mentality was like man this is a lot when I first saw it initially there was a little bit of a shock factor I mean it's an animal but in my mind I'm like look I really want to get good at this like I have to learn this stuff and I have to know how this works I how can I how can I call myself like a professional that cares about what I do and not know where these things come from how to care for them and I will say one thing it's built up the respect that I have for the food when I cook it that's why I I don't that when I'm cooking like my initial thought is this came from an animal animal had to die for this and there's there's a whole sort of Ethics behind being you know a chef so to speak and I think giving respect to the ingredients is only going to be earned when you really see that and you understand that so there's that aspect and but you know I was willing to deal with it to learn it um but I won't say that I loved it you know it's not like I was there like you know just pick up like with a smile on my face I was definitely there were some parts where I was just like man this is a little bit much taking the head off was was rough it was tough for me the first time I did it after a while you get desensitized and you don't really care that I'll say like if you start butchering cool animals in a restaurant which I I never did um but there were there were a couple restaurants I worked for that did whole animal Butchery and you see it so often that when someone slings a pig over their shoulder two guys sling Pig over their shoulder then carry it in it's not really a big deal you know you see it every single year but one of my first restaurants that I worked and I walked in and they had a whole pig that they had roasted the whole thing and uh and one of the line Cooks comes up to me and he had the head in its hand after it was roasted and he's like he's like look man we just roasted this and I was like oh uh I literally just got it it's a little too much for me right now man and then the jaw just kind of went like and then it fell off and I was just like oh my God oh my God so yeah yikes all right so welcome to horror hour how long did it take you to eat the whole pig I I imagine that you just served this over many weeks probably months really yeah there's a lot there was a lot and I mean we froze it all yeah um so some of it I made like bacon like cured the pork belly and like smoked it and sliced it and made like actual like bacon um I tried to cure the legs they didn't really work um we wrote we made one of the legs into a ham like a giant like ham um and yeah it took probably a few months like six months okay a lot and then what about throughout High School were you working part-time at restaurants or were you just doing all of this for fun recreationally it was all recreationally I would cook for my parents my friends but it did get to a point where I wanted to work in restaurants and they they don't like it's a big problem in the industry with like underage uh labor you know because like kids would come in and peel carrots like oh it's so fun can't do that anymore so I had to wait until I was like 18 to work in restaurants when I moved to Austin was when I started working and then yeah that was pretty seamless transition of like the one thing I was doing when I was a kid that I could get work doing is I was doing like food photography stuff anything I could do to get my hands on to making money working in food I would do like food photography uh for mag like small magazines or ebooks um I'd help people do recipe development I'd write recipes for people edit recipes sometimes I would come on to sets and like be a studio assistant to style food um anything I could do and what was your first job it was working a restaurant just like uh what like a line cook or something uh usually your first time you start as a prep cook so you're like chopping loads of vegetables when I say a lot I mean like a lot like 100 pounds of onions or like you know there was um 300 oranges and then you take the oranges and you peel every single one of them with a knife and then you remove each individual segment from the orange but 300 of them though yeah this might seem like a silly question if you've ever taken a cooking lesson or wanted to go to like a cooking college or like a school for this like a culinary school so actually I never went to school or college oh well let me rephrase that I never went to college yeah I didn't go to culinary school either I I mean you know it gets to a point where I was just like do I really need my parents to spend a hundred thousand dollars for me to go to culinary school um but I also tried applying to a couple of them and they all denied me why is that I don't know um I tried going to there was one that I wanted I guess I shouldn't name them but I applied to someone like the most esteemed culinary schools that there are because I was like I'm I'm good like I can go here uh and then I applied to some other ones that were local and I actually applied to a couple colleges too I did not want to go to either of them but I did it anyway because my parents were like oh come on you know they weren't pushing me too much but they were like you know let's let's do it and all the colleges uh did not admit me and none of the culinary schools admitted me and I was just like so where do I go and my parents are like oh we'll just apply to some more and then I was like honestly I'm good and totally broke my mom's heart because my mom hasn't had anyone uh you know on her side that's really gotten the chance to do that and um she would have been the first and so she wanted me to do it and so it was kind of tough for a little bit for her but she let you know she they didn't fight me on it which was cool I really appreciated that and that also goes to show like how much support comes into role uh into play here with this but yeah I mean didn't go to college or culinary school for that reason wow and so what was your experience then going from high school to then working full-time in the industry did that make it less fun for you knowing that it's now a job no I felt like I was getting paid to learn it was awesome yeah I mean granted I was getting paid like nine dollars seven seven to nine dollars an hour and I was like why can't I pay rent this is confusing I work like 90 hours a week but all right I'm gonna you know I was a kid yeah I think in between then I took like a little bit of time off I went to Europe for like two and a half months with all the money that I had saved up um and just went around and ate as much as I could gather as much knowledge as I could I went into a couple like restaurants and worked in the back house for a day as a stash in France actually um super mean very mean they did not like that I didn't speak French which I get I get that um and then when I got back I think I started actually you know what there's there's one piece a story that I forgot to mention which is I was doing a food blog at the time um just for fun and it started doing pretty well and then I randomly got a book deal from this really small publisher and I was like all right okay I was 17 at the time and so I was I was really just doing that it did all right it was like you know nobody really knows about it now they know about it now but back then nobody really knew about it um and then from there after that I pretty much spent all of my money when I moved to Austin like all of it I didn't have that that much I think I had like saved up 12 Grand went to Europe spent half of that I don't know how I managed to do that in two months I have no idea lived off that okay um and then spent the rest of it in Austin had zero dollars and I was like time to get a job and went to restaurants Wow and you somehow afforded rent on like seven what was it like eight bucks an hour yeah so the first one was I think it was around eight or nine dollars an hour um I don't know well the rent was actually really low it was this pretty rinky dinky like old house and I think the rent was man I could be wrong but I think it was like 750. it's pretty low um for especially for Austin that's really low yeah now that it would be what like eighteen hundred dollars oh it's easy oh my God yeah troll yeah it'd easily be like it'd probably be like 12 12 or 1500 now um but yeah I I just didn't spend money on anything else you know I ate all the food that I needed to eat at the restaurant and then when I got home I I might have like some cheap things that I could make like pasta um and then it got to a point where my my girlfriend at the time now fiance would help me pay rent which if you're wondering that's why she's my fiance now pass the test yeah pass the test I mean you know I don't think it's required to pay your essos rent but she helped a bunch so that's cool then where did the concept come for your YouTube channel so I'm trying to remember how that's basically when I was working I I'd gone through working through a few different restaurants lots of fine dining um I got my experience I was getting good and I was getting like known in the community and I was knowing a bunch of the chefs and restaurants and um I was kind of getting veering towards like a sous chef position uh at the current restaurant once you get a sous chef position it's very hard to leave because it's not like you can't quit but it's just the attachment of like how much work work it takes to get to that point you want to like write it out and there's just a certain emotional attachment I was afraid of that because I was like man if I do this I'm not going to be able to do some of the other things that I wanted which those things were I wanted to work I wanted to do like television or shows and visual entertainment essentially because I felt that I did not like the shows that were being put out I thought they were terrible I thought it wasn't doing food Justice and like there's so much exciting stuff out there and I felt that food entertainment was slowly losing the people and that freaked me out because that also was about as equally important to me as the cooking was that was something a passion that I grew over time my dad's like in film and or was he was in film for a number of years and so that was something that I thought was really important and so I wanted to contribute to that too and I'm like how am I supposed to do that working as a line cook uh or turn on at the time going into a sous chef position how am I supposed to do that working 80 to 90 hours a week how am I supposed to have time for that and I was like well I mean I could start on YouTube I could like make a couple videos and like edit them at night and or in the morning instead um and call it a day and maybe we'll see where that goes and maybe I can use that to do other stuff and uh for a year I slept I think four hours a night every single night in order to do that because there was no other way I could find time yeah because think about it I go you go into the restaurant if you're working mornings you go in the restaurant you get up at five and you shower get ready get there at 6 30 or 7. you prep you work until probably 5 30 or 6 and then you get home it's night time and then you eat and you rinse and repeat but typically you would stay after until like seven sometimes I would stay until seven to like learn right but if you're on the line then you come in and you come in instead at like maybe they say noon or one yeah you need to come in at 10 if you want to set up your station on time so really you come in at 10. 10 to 1 in the morning or two in the morning 10 a.m to 20. so then your window of time at 1am you get home by let's say two after you close your station and everything like that you get home at say 1 30 or 2. we'll say 1 30 for posterity 1 30 in the morning you get to bed at like two so two three four five six seven you get up at seven eight nine ten you have two hours to get to the restaurant get your knives sharpen your knives press your Chef coat go to the bathroom work out um so I basically had anywhere between a two and four hour window to get anything done for the YouTube channel and the only way to extract like to expand that for editing was I was like I'll just sleep less it gives me three more hours a day so they gave me six hours a day to do work so that's kind of what the process was to get to that point um and yeah what were the first few videos that you decided to film it started out kind of wonky you can you can go back and see some of my old videos in the apartment that I was at and I just like found some shitty lights and turned it on I think I think I was trying to give like Chef techniques away I was like okay this is how you like set up for cooking and you know make your kitchen efficient and you can do this and that they were really boring and really slow and poorly edited but my idea in my head was like well maybe I can give people the information the secret stuff that nobody gives away all the all these chefs are very secretive you know they don't want to talk about the techniques in the restaurant industry and I was like well I don't give a [ __ ] you're paying me nine dollars an hour I'll say whatever I want yeah and so that's where I started what were some of the secrets you were giving away things that people wouldn't normally know because they're not in cookbooks and you're not going to Google certain nowadays you kind of can because like more and more people are talking about it but you back in the day you couldn't Google some of these techniques people didn't even know they existed just little things like the Finesse and the way that you operate so for example if I was to I'm trying to think I'm trying to think there's so many things okay so like making a cheese foam right if you wanted to make a cheese foam you it's really really basic you need two ingredients and you need a whipped cream canister and that's it but most people don't realize that so if I were to show some of this technique where I'm like yeah you just take cheese you grate it you put it in a blender you pour a boiling cream over it you blend it until it's smooth pour it into that whipped cream canister and fill it with one nitrogen cartridge shake it and you have like a gorgeous voluminous fine dining cheese foam something that you would see in a restaurant and be like wow this is amazing where I'm giving little little techniques like that that you can't just Google that and find it that's interesting and how did you come up with the concept of but better when you started recreating other menu items and doing it better or cheaper so a lot of a lot of my content comes from me being annoyed I feel like the Popeye's Chicken Sandwich do y'all remember that yeah remember that came out yes everyone was freaking out people were really freaking out people work with a lot fighting each other that's the line down the block for Popeye's Chicken I just wanna I just want to come on record to say uh that Popeyes where there was a fight I was living there it was ten five five ten minutes away what happened with the man the person that passed away no oh no no no no no no no no yeah because it got it got that bad I like how we have to clarify what what story there's more than one uh gosh it was there was like two two or three fights but uh no it was like something had happened with like the the manage their employees were like quitting or something because of all the chaoticness and uh it was actually like a a fight between like a manager and a customer they just started like beating the guy up and so I was yeah I was living like five minutes away and I was like gosh put the town on the map over here so wow thanks Popeyes if you want to try it more with them yeah because you hear about that seriously like I want to try that is it that good see that's so interesting to me it's like oh my God somebody died over this time there was a there was a mini Riot because they ran out and people started like going crazy I thought that was the Popeye's Chicken Sandwich yeah I think it was Popeyes that's insane over a chicken sandwich that's not right I think it was 2017 that was the the chicken sandwich craze because KFC was like wait somebody's fighting for your chicken I want someone to fight for my chicken um I don't know but that that's what annoyed me though and then I heard about someone I heard about someone getting killed over this thing and I was like I was like that's where that's where you got to draw the line like if you're not drawing the lineup fist fights in line you're Drawing the Line in human life because that is unbelievably ridiculous and so I I just was so annoyed and so upset at this and my immediate response was like uh you know what I have to go try this because if people are losing their minds over it it better be [ __ ] good so I go I drive there I pull up and I was I was doing videos at the time yeah um I pull up I ordered the sandwich unbelievable line it took an hour so I'm like exhausted at this point I get the sandwich and I take one bite and my immediate response was this is probably one of the worst chicken sandwiches I've ever eaten in my [ __ ] life the fact that I wasted my time here and someone died over this I can't think of a bigger waist and so I took that energy and I was like I could make this way [ __ ] better easily at home with minimal equipment this isn't this is like basic ass [ __ ] and so I was like you know what I'll make a video about it and I kind of had that energy going into it too that sort of like I'm annoyed at this the fact that this happened and so I brought that into the video and I was like we're making this better you can do this at home you not not me not just me you if you're watching this I promise you you can make this if you follow my instructions it will be better and you will have more knowledge and power and you're gonna have fun and you're not gonna wait in line while you watch Jeffrey punch some dude in the face because his chicken sandwich didn't get there on time and so I did it and that video immediately went pretty crazy like day one there was an article about it really yeah because it was at the height of the CH of the Popeyes thing so it immediately kind of swept up and um there were a ton of comments of people being like man Josh you should make this into a series like I just found you blah blah blah like this would be a lot of fun to watch and so I was like okay and here we are 70 or 80 episodes later wow now back when you made that video were you doing YouTube full-time or was this just a side thing that you were working on still I think I had just just become full-time on it I just like nobody's working for me at the time I've just barely become full-time what was that process like how long did it take you to quit your job and and were you nervous about quitting your job at the time to do YouTube yeah it was it was hard I cried when I quit my job because you have like these attachments to these restaurants it's not about what you get paid it's about how much you care about what you're doing nobody works in a restaurant to make money unless you want to build and you know be an owner of a restaurant that's a different concept but as a line cook prep cook it's pure passion the number of times I've seen people go in after work and you don't get to clock in to test stuff and work on dish ideas for free is staggering so I had a big attachment to the restaurant the process of quitting was like I it took me I think I was ready to quit for a while it took me three months to actually pull the trigger and leave because I didn't want to like let my chefs down and like make them think you'll live me or I didn't want to lose the relationships I had and I didn't want to get detached from restaurants that was like a big thing for me and I'm still very close with them I'm also working on my first um and so it's like one of those things where yeah I was just it was just a tough process I was making enough I I knew it was time to leave when I was looking at my paycheck and I was looking at the YouTube check and the YouTube check was probably 100x that really yeah can you share how big the YouTube paycheck was back then yeah so I'm trying to remember what it was 100 100x may not may not be an accurate maybe more like 50x but it was like I was getting paid like around like 30 000 a month and as a line cook getting paid 11 an hour yeah crazy to me like I would have seen 30 000 a month and then 11 an hour and be like okay easy decision right there it was it was scary because uh I was so used to like barely being able to pay rent for so long that seeing that kind of money I was just I saved every dollar I was not [ __ ] with that money at all so it was it was tough to kind of like step away but I will say that I knew I wanted to leave and I knew I could handle it it was just like I said the emotional attachment but imagine like line cooking and have maybe you have a bad day because this happened several occasions on several occasions I have a bad day and I'm like it's just a rough night and I'm cooking and you know maybe maybe one of the chefs is getting on me and by the way all these guys are amazing so I'm not [ __ ] on them at all but maybe you know it gets it gets heated in the kitchen sometimes and they're like you know maybe [ __ ] I mean they're like God damn Josh like you really are not on your game tonight like you [ __ ] up two steaks did this you did this and they're like and they're like you know you want that holiday bonus start working and I'm like you have no [ __ ] idea like you have no idea in two months like you know not not to be a dick but it's like in my mind what was the what would the bonus have been like at the time is it like 500 bucks a thousand dollars oh like 150 or 200 bucks maybe wow yeah now did they know you had the YouTube channel at the time or no they did okay but they didn't know you how much you're making they had no idea yeah yeah and what was your production schedule like at that point or how many how many videos are you posting a week uh one to two some weeks were one it was pretty sporadic I didn't really have a very good posting schedule um but I was very consistent if I had posted one it was on Wednesdays if I posted two it was on Sundays and Wednesdays every single time no matter what no you did everything yourself from filming to planning to yep it's fantastic yeah it was it that well that's why I said I slept five hours every night yeah because I literally would sometimes I didn't sleep at all I would film something in the morning and I'd have like three hours before I needed to be at work so I'd film something in the morning or if it flip if I was working in the morning vice versa I would film it just before the sun went down right I run home and get it filmed or on a day off I would film two videos and then I would edit throughout the work days so like if I had work in the more uh in at night you know like night shift then I would wake up at probably 5 a.m or 4 a.m go to the gym immediately come back at it for an hour go to work come back at around one in the morning and then I would edit from one in the morning to three in the morning and then go to bed and then wake up at you know four or five sometimes yeah and then how did that schedule change when you went full time that was wild what was your first day like am I waking up and there's nothing to do but YouTube yeah I mean I remember my media that was like I'm not going to go and like rest I don't want to start this off with I didn't want to start developing bad habits so my immediate response was like I'm working every single day I'm working more than how whatever the energy was that it took to work at a restaurant I'm just gonna do that 2x for this so I immediately started working like way more um I but I did get more sleep so that was good and how was balancing a relationship at the same time as getting like three hours of sleep a night that was tough I've never she also was a teacher uh her name's Kate yeah uh yeah she was working as a teacher so we never saw each other for a year for an entire year ages we lived together yeah I mean we like so she would she would I would wake up she would be asleep I would come back she would be asleep every day except for the days off you know if there was a day off I would see her and we would spend a lot of time how long have you been dating her at that time two years I think yeah so the year before that we saw each other more and a year before that yeah yeah wow I used to drive so she lived in San Marcos at the time going to college so I would drive from Austin which is about a 45 30 to 45 minute drive I would sometimes go to work immediately get off she was in college at you know so her hour her hours were pretty flexed so she would stay up so I would leave the restaurant you know maybe midnight drive 45 minutes straight from the restaurant all my [ __ ] with my knives and [ __ ] drive all the way to her in San Marcos take a quick shower and then we would hang out from you know like midnight or 12 30 in that case to like two or three in the morning I'd spend the night there and then I'd immediately get up at like six or seven well no that was a night show so I'll get up close to like 10. um get ready leave and drive all the way back to Austin with all my knives and stuff you know what that's absolutely crazy because I have a very similar story when I first uh was dating my wife um she was going to school in Milwaukee and I was living in Illinois which is like an hour and a half I would wake up again 5 30 to get the commute um and I probably wouldn't leave until midnight I wouldn't get there till 1 in the morning and we would spend time so I know exactly what you mean yeah and that that's a tough situation to be in was she understanding of that like right from the gecko or or because cause I know sometimes it's hard for your partner to visualize like okay how long is this going to be or did she know like all right you're gonna grind it out for however like were you clear up front about like what your plan was or or how did you feel about that not at all I was well first off let me let me rephrase that she was extremely understanding I was not clear at all I never said anything about how long it was gonna last what it was going to look like um I just was expressing her how much I liked her and I think that she saw the effort because like I I very rarely asked her to come to me it was like I'll go to you you do your thing like you're in college like let me come to you I'll I'll do that so I think she saw the effort and kind of like use that as I guess uh collateral for the emotional attachment right where it's like okay well he's putting in at least this much effort in so I know he cares um she's easy to please you know she's a laid back out she had to deal with a lot for me starting on because it's like never see me it's always late at night I'm usually like [ __ ] dead when I saw her yeah like dead I mean I can muster up you know we watch a little fun movie we laugh you know you muster up the energy but she always got me at 50 for probably five years yeah did that ever worry you that that would have a toll in the relationship yeah yeah I mean it did but you know what it I think it actually helped the relationship because it made us work through our issues more quickly because they were exacerbated by the exhaustion yeah but we ended up I feel like building a really good foundation because of it it started off poorly and then got better and better and better and better rather than worse whereas most relationships start off great and get worse and worse and worse and worse was that like cheesy saying if you can't tolerate me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best don't don't ever see it this guy no I knew this was gonna happen I'm just saying it replies it makes sense you know it does it does make sense I agree with that yeah no I agree with that I think that that uh For Better or Worse whatever the saying is I agree with that I also think at the end of the day you have to be able to do your [ __ ] like if you're gonna be in a relationship with somebody if you have a desire in your life or there's something you want to do you have to be able to do your [ __ ] and if that person's not gonna let you do it I'm sorry but no you need to move on yeah you know and so my and I I felt that way but she also had zero ego in it so I was just like hell yeah this is great you think distance is ever a viable reason to break up with someone or do you think like if you really love that person that you can make it work so it wouldn't work anyways basically man distance is really hard I've done it before I don't like it I don't think I would want to put up with it but but if it was with my fiance now I definitely would but it but that's the thing though it it skews your ability to unto to have foresight for the future of that relationship like now obviously in hindsight I'm like Oh my God look at this amazing relationship we've developed but that took years so maybe if it was early on in the first year how would I have known right but um I would say shortening of the story is it's probably possible but it's a lot harder what do you think Graham uh I think everyone has different emotional needs and if that's not something they're comfortable with I don't think there's anything wrong with that but you I think it would make it easier knowing there's an end date like hey if you could put up with like this one year like just go through this one year or like a year and a half however long it is then you at least see the end of the tunnel but just having this indefinite date in the future that could be any time I think that would that'd be difficult I I have a hot take here but I think it's hard for somebody to see how compatible they are if you don't live together and I think that's changing with like the current generation where a lot of people are moving in before they get married uh but like I want to know that person's like bad habit so everything before I like make that decision so what was the thing that was most surprising about calcium this is gonna get clipped all over Tick Tock of course all right um give me a second tag Kelsey in this yeah what's her at if you can let everyone know didn't see oh I think the most surprising this is gonna show you know what this is a fitting podcast to disclose this but uh the most shocking thing was that this girl really can't cook like anything at all like like not to not just because this is you know about food but like um when she was living in college like I I would like I'm not a cook myself like I can cook but I wouldn't say I'm great uh but I can make food um and I would be like so like you're saying you can't cook like how are you eating she'd be like well like I go visit my mom like once a month and she makes all these like home-cooked meals and she freezes them all and like then she like unfreezes them and she goes and I'm just like like she did not know like it was so bad I'm sorry Kelsey it was so bad she didn't know how to make like scrambled eggs and oh boy and so we had a bad case and when I did a house tour video I like made a joke about like not her not being able to cook and uh I I think her you know her mom or whatever might have taken a little bit of fence to that but I was like I don't you know I was like no it's not your fault like a lot of people nowadays like you know like they can't cook but that was the biggest shock so yeah so starting the relationship I had to cook I had to cook everything basically and I and I and I cooked everything pretty much up until today she's still kind of she's getting better but yeah that was the biggest shock for me wait I'm a little lost on what you were talking about the biggest shock was that she couldn't cook yes like even basic things yeah it was because think about it if you date somebody and you don't move in with them you may not know that because you know when somebody says they don't know how to cook you assume like oh like like yeah oh yeah yeah or like like no but like genuinely like my wife did not know how to cook but what's your uh how do you do dinner well I typically cook everything but now now she's getting better so uh the other day she what did she cook uh here's gosh coffee I'm so sorry Kelsey I'm sorry for exposes like a typical if I'm work I work a lot and so if I'm working like a typical thing like she'll eat is like she likes to take like a bag of like frozen corn from the freezer and like she won't even heat it up she'll just eat it or like she'll open up like a green bean can and she'll just like eat it out of the can no no no so anyway what's your name Kelsey Kelsey you don't have to do this I'm here for you tell her what she can do with some frozen corn yeah yeah give us a frozen corn with that literally anything what do you recommend if someone doesn't know how to cook how can they make themselves a nutritious meal for cheap it's not microwaved what oh my God yes um okay oh God I mean there's a million things let's start they gotta start somewhere maybe you start with scrambled eggs you know that's that's the first concern I had when you said that let me start there um the internet is is the resource I think right and I'm not even doing this to plug my own channel but it's just kind of like everything's out there Google your exact issue and find it it's there there's a way to do it that being said though there are there's two tent poles that a lot of people struggle with with cooking first one is failure and that's like number one people are afraid to make something and [ __ ] it up they don't want to dedicate their time and money and [ __ ] it up and be bad that makes sense it's also a larger statement about Society but we'll talk about that later and then the second issue is that they don't think that they're capable like they just think that they are okay that it's totally separate from the failure aspect they just think that they're completely incapable and then that that's for somebody else too that's not for me I don't like do that and so those two things kind of have to get taken away and then you just have to Google something and find something and you'd be surprised because we're the only animal on planet Earth that cooks our food before we eat it there's no other animal on earth known in existence as far as I know they cook their food before they eat it it's built in our DNA food is more nutritious and easy to assimilate nutrients when you cook it so it's we're supposed to which means that yes even your wife can cook but I also understand that people don't want to cook I don't want the last thing I will say is I don't think anyone needs to cook if someone's like I don't want to cook cool I don't have any uh quarrel or judgment on that whatsoever so see I'm worried about the time commitment of cooking because I see this as like some women with financial advice here I'm going to be scared how many hours does it cost me to cook what's the opportunity cost of microwaving that meal I could be making a video instead of investing instead could be doing so many let me Google my net worth really quickly um divide that yeah divide that carry the four yeah so that'd be like going to Nobu 30 times um but you know I get that that makes sense but I see like I'm spending an hour cooking something and then five minutes eating it like the ratio is not there like an hour for five minutes Cooks everything for you no no let me give you an example no no I have an example right here of uh one of Graham's meals and he actually made a video about it which uh you guys can see so Josh I want you to review this video or this meal and I want you to tell me what Graham could have done better okay oh my God and this is another video old video if you guys want to look it up it's called how to make 97 Cent breakfast my morning routine so what he does is he takes eggs and he puts him in no pan and then he is there any is there any oil or butter in the pan before uh a little oil I do a little like olive oil okay I just don't want it to stick you're adding anything you adding any uh seasoning to the egg Ramen or nothing just nothing what no why I don't like it no no Graham really we I know we just met there's no way you do not like salt pepper yeah I like the most plain stuff there's no can you do you have anything to say about this I need somebody I'm surprised I'm just as surprised as you are I'm I thought you probably would have salted it you've never heard him you've never seen me use salt and pepper I'm just saying I I would have thought that yeah but you go out to the restaurants yeah you go out to restaurants and you like the food so my guess is you think you don't like salt and pepper because it takes more time to go grab it and put it in your food but if you like food from restaurants like they season their food properly so as a judge here and I never had an issue with it but it's not like having an issue it's like okay this would make it okay hold on let's move on here real quick I'll finish this off real quick just so we could get a full review and and finish off so he takes the eggs he puts it in the pan No seasoning whatsoever um then he's basically making like an omelet and he's putting a pre-shredded sharp cheddar cheese from Kroger on there and some turkey pre-sliced turkey breast from Kroger also and then uh toasting a bagel and adding cream cheese onto the bagel so what would you say to that meal how could we make it better we need it we need to make yes 97. for that meal well maybe not with inflation now with inflation it's yeah it's like 40 now right yeah that makes sense um well yeah um I mean the meal itself in essence there's nothing wrong with I mean Deli me and I understand why you use that for the price point so that makes sense it could still be good maybe like I don't know I would like ham better because turkey tastes weird in when it gets heated for some reason unless it's in a sandwich um I think you just put salt and pepper that's the one that's it that's it maybe if there's anything I mean maybe not an omelette but in some things yes if there's one thing that I think people make the biggest mistake and the first thing I judge a restaurant on within the it takes me a fraction of a second to tell whether restaurants on their [ __ ] and it is sultan it is salt levels most places I would say salt is single-handedly one of the most powerful influential elements to making great food because most places just don't know how to put enough but I also think that like you know in your case some people are either sensitive to it or it's not something that they really think about and it doesn't really affect their experience but I would say most people though their their experience is severely affected with lack of salt but too much could completely ruin the meal yeah yeah I mean too much of anything right like all right you know um it's sort of like you want to balance the amount of salt in it you want to basically you want to push salt as far as it can physically go before reaching that salty level so if you ever go to a restaurant you're like man this is my favorite restaurant everything they make is so so so so so so good those places oftentimes are seasoning their food to the absolute Max just before that line one of the chefs I used to work for he would test his sauces he would make the sauce season it and it would take him like 15 minutes to season a sauce he would like season it stir taste season stir taste like over and over and over and the way he would uh to make sure it had enough salt is he would take about a teaspoon and then put a really tiny sprinkle of salt on it right and if that tiny sprinkle of salt took it overboard it was there that's really interesting that is yeah I imagine you have a really good blood pressure me because of your lack of salt conception it's low I have low blood pressure consume more salt then right you think so is that the movement I am not a medical professional do not take any of my advice yeah no mine is consistently at the point where if it were any lower it would be a concern I've never heard of low blood neither have I this guy's never stressed out doesn't he he's constantly stressed out but my blood pressure doesn't doesn't go up like even when I did the boxing thing they did the blood pressure and it was like slightly too low and they're like we need to do jumping jacks and I'm like I am nervous on the inside I'm like okay and I got it up but consistently it's just been low wow so you've been having some problems getting it up yeah I'll tell you one thing my blood pressure my blood pressure is always high whenever I wanted to get Twitter yeah every time I see his Twitter he's like the housing market is crashing and I'm like cool that's awesome I'm really glad that I bought two [ __ ] houses yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah so tell us about you you bought uh you bought two houses yes so um one in Austin and one in La two Studios basically because we go to La so frequently um and so my mentality we are actually building a studio separately in Austin now but the reason why we did the place in LA which you know is you know maybe we'll rent it out every once in a while to pay the mortgage whatever I'm not really I'm flexible on it but we go there so often and it is so expensive to bring my team rent out of space shoot in it and I like La I'm from La so you know I want to spend a lot of time there um that was actually I did the math and I was like well if I can find that house for this price and I build the kitchen in it it would be less expensive and I could rent it out to tenants and pay it when I'm not there and or sorry rent it out on Airbnb and you know pay for the mortgage when I'm not there and then when I'm there just you know don't block those dates out so we did that and I got a place in La and um we're not there very often but in the sense of like our total shoots but we're there often enough that it's utilized to the potential that I wanted it for yeah what's your team look like now so we've got 11 dedicated people no and then we have um a bunch of like Freelancers that we use um you know thumbnail editors uh have you guys seen this by the way have you seen this like huge weight I'll talk about it later uh no let's talk about it now I'm curious now this huge wave of like thumbnail artists yeah yeah it's like going crazy because of Mr Beast obviously King Legend makes sense I get it um but we started working with some of them and they're cool so we use we use some thumbnail artists um and then my 11 dedicated people so we have my director and who I now call my vice president he's been with me since almost like day one like when I was making enough money to hire somebody he was my first hire um his name is Vikram he's incredible he's extremely good work ethic top tier what does he do so he does he does now pretty much everything with me so like we ideate content together he does editing still um I really need to get him off editing because it's just taking too much of his time but you know like when you care about what you do he has like a iron grip on some of the creative and so yeah he still wants to edit it despite us having several editors but so he does directing on set um we'll work on building out run of shows for shoots um he will like I said we come with creative ideas I bounce ideas off him sometimes we'll work on like new Revenue sources together um he'll handle like brand deal stuff like creative like submitting creative stuff between Brands and sponsorships so that we can like make that system efficient yeah and then everything in between that you would imagine the only thing he doesn't handle is like obviously like financials like I I still do that but um but yeah he he also functions like a managing factor in the team and then we have uh we have my lead editor Maya she's great um incredibly talented again work ethic top tier so she does basically oversees all edits and helps make sure that the editing schedule is like consistent every single time she and she rules it with a iron fist she's like when's this coming when is that coming you know she's great and then we have you know our our other editors um a few staff editors we have some people who are part-time um editing and part-time on-set shooting so we'll have like you know one guy uh his name is Kendrick he is on camera when we're shooting but he's also editing when we when he's not on Set uh then I have my executive assistant who basically handles like scheduling for myself and then other people in the team um and then we have our content coordinator who makes thumbnails he works on content SEO with me and um all sorts of other things website we built out this really cool website that is super messed up with the recipes I gotta figure that out but um yeah and that's pretty much I mean there's other people obviously but it's like editors coordinators assistant director and some writers that's a huge team if I don't I don't know why I thought it was just like you and maybe two people that's how it feels yeah I mean you know we could we could go lighter oh there's two other people I completely forgot about uh culinary as well so I have a culinary produce I call them culinary producer uh and then a culinary assistant so they both like measure ingredients out if stuff needs to be pre-prep they pre-prep it the day before I'll send them the recipe that's a great idea yeah so I'll send them the recipe and all this stuff and I'm like hey um you know be sure to get these ingredients and this is exactly how we need to prep this out make this sauce make this soup boil this down do this this bring it all the way up to where it needs to be so that when we get on set it's a three-hour shoot not an eight hour shoot um and they do all that that stuff uh and help with uh cleanup yeah like I've seen it with some of the cooking channels where they put something in an oven and then there's an oven next to it they're like and then they just immediately take it out hooked yeah that I mean that's how you do it otherwise it takes so long if you're doing everything uh in French terms would be El minut which means like everything to order everything right away oh the chicken here's the chicken it's done um it's way better if it's pre-made so we'll have like sauces that take six hours to boil down right so we're gonna do all that the day before put in a quart container leave it in the fridge so that when we start the shoot we're boiling the sauce down and then you know it's boiling on camera we get the shot okay cool I go put it off to the side and then I pull out the one that's already done like looks like this wow so but we do that with with those people so they'll they'll be pre-prepping that for me and I'll go check on and make sure that it's right and all that what's your schedule look like day to day chaos yeah yeah you it sounds like it's really organized right now it's very chaotic but I like working a lot you know even if we had enough employees for me to have more time for myself I would not do that you know it's just it's I like the process I'm sure you guys as well you know we all work a lot here um it's doing the stuff that's fun so my schedule is usually I get up at four or five every day no matter what weekend holiday doesn't matter I do not get up later than that unless a special occasion like I gotta I stayed up way too late the night before or something else right maybe a vacation which I have taken one vacation in the last 10 years so so I get up at four or five in the morning go to the gym come back once I get back I immediately am like on emails or I'm working on writing recipes I'm writing stuff for my next book I'm writing stuff for some other Concepts that I'm working on Restaurant related stuff that I'm working on um and then buy about nine this is non-filming days yeah um by about like nine it's like back-to-back calls from nine to five p.m and then I'll try to like squeeze stuff in between that like write a recipe in between calls um and then I'll test recipes at night if I can um I would say I test Maybe 10 of our recipes before we shoot them so I just like write the recipe and it usually works and that's that and then shooting days same thing but there's a shoot in the middle of the day that lasts about six hours so you take calls for like eight hours sometimes yeah what do you what do you have to talk about that so I was kind of thinking the same thing like what's saying you know I just want to say this I I don't remember I don't I hate them to mix it too but it was either Alex formosi I don't know if you're familiar with him or Elon Musk maybe I think it was Elon Musk one of the two said like oh the meetings it was like 95 of meetings aren't needed yeah also if a meeting has more than like three people in it like everyone that isn't talking or like listening or whatever or directly related to that meeting is just wasting their it was Elon it's just wasted yeah yeah it was Elon and it's really made me re-evaluate like obviously like calls are important but a lot of the times like a call can be solved just with like a simple text or like a group call could just be like a group text like it's just a lot more efficient yeah well it's funny you say that we're actually working on grinding that down a little bit for that exact reason because there are some calls that are inefficient that we have regularly because I like to be I'm a communicative guy so I like to communicate with everyone as much as possible but I agree with that and there are calls we're taking off that being said though um it's mostly because we condense a lot of my calls throughout the week on like just a couple of days because all my other days I'm too busy to take calls like you know filming and stuff yeah filming or recipe developing or just we're working on a lot of projects at once so you know we're building the studio in Austin so like there might I need to get on the phone call with on a phone with my contractor right I need to get on the phone with the guy that we're leasing the building with I need to get on a you know so like little things like that we're just I think it's a combination of working on so many projects and some calls being inefficient that we're working on grinding those down and then the third thing is we squish it all on the light just Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday I almost never have calls interesting yeah how's your business broken down now in terms of the income is it is it ad revenues sponsorships your own products so it's broken down into a couple different sectors obviously we have ad revenue from YouTube um and then we have like you know all the other things like Snapchat and all the other social media sites that produce income um and then there's my cookbook my second cookbook my merchandising and then we are working on some other stuff uh I really like to take my time with the product space yeah you know I really don't like the idea of being like well I can make I can make a million dollars right now I just come up with this project and and white label it a call today like quality is so important to me I want people to buy stuff that they love so we're working on that um product space obviously brand sponsorships um and then sometimes I'll do like a little bit of like Consulting work but that's pretty infrequent so I wouldn't even really calculate that in um and I'm probably forgetting some other things but that's some of it can I break it down like a pie like for example this is this certain yes or whatever so there's adrev is probably anywhere from 30 to 50 percent book is anywhere from 20 to 30 percent probably closer to 50 45 for ad rev um and then everything else kind of breaks down pretty evenly sure I would say yeah um have you ever thought about doing the Mr Beast approach of doing like the the Mr Beast Burger but you could come up with your own concept and and have a ghost kitchen do it for you so I've looked into ghost kitchens a bunch I knew about ghost kitchens before Mr Beast probably ever even thought about it because I was working in I knew about ghost kitchens when they were just beginning to like become a thing who knows maybe Mr Beast knew I'm not like trying to say anything but um it is so hard to maintain good consistency of product in a ghost kitchen so I would like to do one to get food to more people that being said from a professional professional's perspective working in food I'd rather have a brick and mortar and it I'd rather put my energy towards that for now and do a ghost kitchen later we were approached by the same company that approached Mr Beast at the same time he got approached and they were like we can open 100 locations for you in the next six months and I was like wow that sounds [ __ ] horrible that's not good because if you do that there's going to be crazy inconsistency you're gonna have so much [ __ ] so many [ __ ] up orders and guess what Mr Beast had a lot of [ __ ] up orders they had to go back and fix a lot of things I remember talking to read about it and I was like man I'm I'm so sorry like if I can help you guys please let me know they managed they did it I felt so bad because I was looking on Twitter and I I think the first night that they came out with it I placed an order and I was looking at Twitter because I was so curious I wanted to make a whole video on this yeah but ever it's already saturated yeah yeah but um but yeah I've seen some of the inconsistencies on that and just how they've had to deal with that thankfully it seems like everyone was super understanding it was like hey you can't just do this and have every Order Perfect like it's gonna happen so it seems like and and they made it right so quickly they're like if anything is wrong we'll send you another one we'll give you it free we'll give you a you know a gift card on top of that like that I have to say when it first came out I placed an order for me and a bunch of friends and uh it was like probably eighty dollars worth of food or something and I got half of it could not figure out a way to submit a claim to get a refund like it and and there was problems with this because it like Mr Beast had put out a thing like if this happened to you like tweet out at me and I was like yeah I was about to say you just tweet out I was like I'm not gonna tweet at him so Mr Beast if you're watching this like I'm gonna put my venmo right here you want to send me 40 bucks get over it Alex come on listen I'm I'm a hard-working man you know forty dollars is forty dollars I will say this I will say this they did an extremely good job I have so much respect for them in the way that they handled that I agree they did so good um I love them both and read I don't know where Reed came into play there but read like was very on top of it with him so I was surprised to see how much they cared about the product which you don't see very often so they did a really good job turning that around but let's let just to refocus back on to if I did that yeah that is Imagine like my whole brand is centered around my food being good how the [ __ ] would that go if I did that happen to me all right wow yeah that would have [ __ ] destroy me for Jimmy it's he's not known as the oh now he almost is with feastables but he's figured it out like the thing is like he from a qual he cares about quality I know he does but they've figured out they figured out how to fix the pipeline so they're good but like I would have been a guinea pig in that scenario and like I care so much about the experience of the person eating my food I could never risk that could no not even one meal you know I mean I used to work in restaurants where every single plate counted every single plate so imagine like I'm just like okay let me open a hundred places like let's see what happens like God bless hope this works out you know and yeah I would that would have been I would have been in like shambles if that happened to me but you built a substantial business off the cookbook yeah that is it does seem like crazy numbers yeah we didn't expect it to do as well as it did which I was surprised about um I not to say that I didn't think it would do well I'll give you an example of why I so I told you I released a cookbook when I was 17 right it didn't sell I think it sold like 10 000 copies which is like pretty cool for a kid right but um I I went to you know the San Francisco Ferry Building do you know what you've never been how is that possible how's it possible I don't know you guys have never heard of the San Francisco have you heard of the San Francisco never nope have you been to San Francisco yeah I have I like whoever is listening to this I know that there are people listing this podcast that is like wow this just changed their opinion about it [Laughter] yeah yeah they're warfing it up over there right um so short on the story it's a really big beautiful building in San Francisco that has a bookstore in it that's really famous and a bunch of other like little shops to serve food it's very big it's like uh if you saw it it's a very grandiose like long long building and uh so I went there when I was a kid with my buck to do a book tour at the time this was when I was like 17 years old and uh one person showed up to the book tour and which was awesome like I was so scared it still feels good but it's also kind of bummed out where I was just like I don't know why I expected more people when I and again I was 17 so you know those kinds of things get to you and it stuck with me like it stuck with me uh fast forward to me launching this book you know I was 25 when it came out so I launched this book and when I got to the ferry building I was filled with fear because I was like I was like what if that all happens again like I don't know if I can handle that right now after all the work that I put into this book like I put a lot into this book I don't know if I can handle walking up to this and only seeing like two or three people or even like 50 people like I not to say that I needed a lot of people there to make me feel good but I was just like it was like a defining moment of like this is how it's gonna go and I didn't see anyone in the bookstore and I was like [ __ ] like it's there's nobody here there's no way and um one of the ladies came out who was there when I came there the first time she's like it's nice to see you again I was like oh yeah and she's like they're outside and I walked outside and there were 2 000 people knocked around the building No 3 000 people 3 000 people wrapped around the building and I'd never seen a line like that before like literally the line went down the entire length of this football sized building all the way around it and I was like holy [ __ ] that's when I realized I think the book's doing good and um every time we did a book event it was literally like 3 000 people showed up every single time we did a book event in Chinatown in LA and we did released a special burger and I was like we'll do a book signing come get a burger it'll be fun um and the line was all wrapped around Chinatown and I was like oh so people are liking the book that's great um and uh you know then then the news had come out I remember when I was waiting to find out if we hit New York Times bestseller and I was sitting at the computer waiting for the email like refreshing they're like oh we find out today and I'm refreshing and I'm like you know what like I had two two positions in my mind I was like if we don't get any New York Times bestseller that's totally cool but the other side I was like I have something in mind that I want to go and get if we hit New York Times bestsell with just any position just give me just one position and then I got a phone call from my publisher and the publisher and they said that we got number one New York Times bestseller on in all genres oh my God and I was like for all genres like outside of cookbooks and they're like all genres so we outsold every single book um how did you get that time period for uh I think it was almost it was we were one of the like top selling books of the year I think in all genres how did you do that was that just the YouTube channel it was a you know I'd love to say that there was a I mean there was a strategy I mean why would I launch a book with no strategy but I mean it wasn't an exorbitant you know chock full of do this that then and this and then I mean we promoted it on the channel and we did some fun skits and that was kind of it you know we promoted it a lot on the YouTube channel and I did a I did like one tick tock on it [Music] um I tweeted it out a few times I had it in a lot of videos like where it was in the background so some product placement stuff and but I mean I just spoke very honestly about it and I was like look you know this is a book that I want to release for a long time blah blah blah and it was just cool to see people show up I think people were excited to see that it was like a professional's book instead of all these other you know personalities so to speak a lot of people in food are per there's a lot of personalities in food that have not put in like the in a extraordinary amount of work that I put in to a craft and so I think it was really cool to see the people kind of return the favor a little bit where they were like it felt like uh the age-old concept of like oh is this real like do people even care about this anymore it was a really nice reassuring moment to see that they do wow what's the process of writing a book how do you do that it's aren't you are you working on one gram now yeah you're not about that huh no I'd much rather make a video yeah for me I don't read that many books I'll listen to like audiobooks but I don't read it I've not sat down there and read a book and so I feel like why would I do something that you know I'm not gonna sit down and read a book once I put up at some point yes once I put out my third book it will be officially I will have written more books than I've read all the way through it's just I just don't read books all the way through but um so the process is pretty lengthy they give you like a deadline and and it's sort of like a wrap like a race to get to that point um for a cookbook it's normally broken down in like okay how many recipes are going to be how many pages that book has over 100 recipes and like 200 and something Pages um and then you you define what recipes are going to be there you write them and everything and then you figure out what the book is prior to doing that obviously figure out what the book is going to be about what's the concept and then you build everything out from there so it starts at the top of the tree and then you build the rest of the tree out um it's not that bad if you really know what you're doing and you know what you're writing about in my opinion if you're struggling to write a book probably you shouldn't be writing that book it should be easy I'm sure if you if if I don't know if someone came to you and offered you enough money and they were like hey do this book um you know maybe you do it and they you know they ask you to talk about something that you know the most about you probably have a pretty easy time writing about it it takes a long time and it's a bit of a grind but you know you know it's all it's all up here it's tough for me because I feel like well I just make a YouTube video yeah like it would probably be with real estate investing of some sort but I made so many videos on that that's fair and I feel like then the video just gets pushed out the algorithm helps and people could watch it they could you know well pause it come back to it they could listen to it in the car I've thought about yeah I would say it's two things think about it like you have this podcast you have what you're doing on YouTube and you have what you do on Instagram etc etc and what's smart about that is you know you're making content for people who want to consume it differently and text is still a piece of content that people want to consume differently and there's only a few categories that perform really well in literature and that is food and financial self-help and maybe a couple of you know fiction books that somehow blow up like you know Harry Potter is a great book right a great series you know that blue because of what it is that that would be like another format for you to put out and like if they gave you a better royalty you know a lot of people say books don't pay I didn't think that was the case until this um granted like it did it wasn't a great split for the first book but it got better after that oh there's a publisher author split yeah so like they basically do all the work like logistically and you just have to write well I mean I I did more than right I was I also was the creative and art director for the book I was we hired a photographer but I basically chose all the direction of the visuals for the photography I did all the food styling I did all the well I I um brought on some people to help me cook the food because it was like we filmed in in six days we took all the photos for the book wow 100 over 100 recipes we cooked in six days and photographed so you do all of the content inside the book and then the publisher does everything aside from that and they did they pitch you on the idea or do you pitch them on the idea I'll never let somebody pitch me on an idea and it better be really good I've never I don't like that kind of stuff but a publisher would approach you and say hey we want to publish a book for you do you have any ideas you pitch them on that yep and then they either agree or decline to it and then yeah okay yeah it depends on where you're at with them right like I I think I have a really good relationship with my publisher so I could go to them and be like I want to do this book and they'd probably just be like okay cool and we would go and do it sure um but after that um yeah it's pretty much like you said you make all the content they will put it on a book and make it look nice and they have editors that edit it for you and they know how to do all the traditional things that would be done for the book so distribution printing has to be thought of because that shouldn't get expensive but like when I was looking at sales and everything I did the math and and um you know assuming that splits are good but if I had self-published the book I probably would have made about granted I would have to pay people you know so it would be a little bit less than this after paying a you know an editor and for distribution and everything but the grant the gross would be probably about 15 million dollars on one that's insane in the first year now In fairness though do you think you would have done that even hiring out uh with that book versus the publisher who already has those those resources and that knowledge like is that something proprietary to them that like it's I feel like even if you hired it out it wouldn't it might not be the same quality that they're able to do right off the bat if you don't know what you're doing yeah it could go horribly wrong and I don't think we would have been able to do it because distribution at the time this was at the height of all of the you know shortages of this and we don't have these materials we don't have these materials and you know what I'm talking about like kind of uh back end of kovid but when there was like nothing left they managed to distribute and print this book while nobody else could print their books like everyone was struggling printing books and my publisher is the reason why we were able to put out so many books I don't know I imagine if we couldn't print books and we're getting all these orders that would be horrible I mean and so honestly I gotta hand it to them like they were because they're so big they were like reaching to Pub we were printing the book in Canada in the U.S in overseas and like printing it in multiple parts of the world and like Distributing them all over the place in order they had to coordinate all that I mean I don't know that I would have been able to do that on my own how much do you think of that was just really good timing because issuing that book around covid when everyone is at home I feel like cooking would take uh a lot more priority for a lot of people because they're home they have the time partially maybe it it may have been this is actually more so on the tail end when people were already going back out eating and things were getting a little more normalized definitely not 100 but like families were getting together again and it was it was much better than the height of kovid um personally I think it was good timing because people more people were cooking at the time uh because people started cooking in Covenant and then for some people it's stuck but other than that um maybe a little bit of good timing uh I honestly am a big believer in brand and being honest and being good with your intentions and I I really am like I care so much about what we do and I think I've made that evident to my you know me being real in the sense of my craft that people just sought and they bought because they know that I care and I that's what I think that's why I think it happened personally just because I feel like I've built a really good relationship where I'm like look this is what it is like I don't I don't [ __ ] around with this stuff no do you want to open a restaurant yeah multiple where everywhere but it's a process it's easier said than done some of these restaurants are really expensive to build you can't just like you know nowadays to build a restaurant you want to build a nice restaurant and and I'm not saying it has to be overly gaudy but you know the restaurant I want to build easily four or five million dollars that much starting cost yep wow and does that oh obviously that would include um rent for a building it would not include rent rent would be anywhere but I mean rent can be really high so are we just talking about the build out alone for all the equipment 45 million plus you're probably looking at another I don't know a million and a half a year and just overhead I'm guessing yep rent can range anywhere from 20 000 a month to 75 000 a month uh in Austin depending where you are there's a buddy of mine works with a huge Restaurant Group and they have a restaurant in Austin that's on South Congress or no I'm sorry not South Congress um and their rent is 85 000 a month and it's not a huge building yeah that's to me that's exorbitant that's like way too much I'll go for it as you say it's not worth that much in my opinion what type of food would you make in the restaurant depends on which restaurant I want to open I have multiple Concepts uh sort of already built out with menus and everything but I think that I want to do uh like a finer dining concept like a high high high fine dining and then I think I have another concept that I I can't really say but it's sort of a Midway point and very much like my style of cooking like me incarnate um and something I think people would really really like and that's the one that I'm probably going to lead with first and then just kind of build out from there I like the concept of Beast Burger I think Beast Burger is really cool I think people love hamburgers so maybe maybe there's like a fast food concept as well um Smash Burger yeah I mean like Smash Burgers are fun but it's also an oversaturated Market there's so many burger places now everyone's doing a burger place um I love the dobrix concept that's cool so but I I you know I'll tell you right now that once my restaurant drops good luck to everybody else that's starting the restaurant really yeah I would love to you know what would have been a uh maybe a saucy video is dope Ricks but better yeah well anytime someone drops a concept my first thought is like let's do a collab and uh we'll make it but better but then we put that on your menu it would do really well yeah and then do like do that in waves yeah it's it's yeah it's it's you would do that with dough bricks totally if anyone here is watching yeah it has a connection yeah that would be a great idea yeah I think it would do really well I think it would do really well and it'd be a lot of fun for people too because you know you have your core menu and people know what they're gonna get pepperoni this and that and this and that but this gives you an opportunity to try something new on your menu in two ways a you can stress test it do people like it or not they'll probably like it and B you you're providing diversity to your com to your customer base so they they're going to come back and order again and again and again but they know every once in a while they'll get something special uh so and then maybe down the line you're like this sold so well I'm gonna put this on the menu and then maybe it becomes your new number one core menu item which would be great and for a restaurant how often are you supposed to change out the menu or offer newer items many restaurants don't change them like very often at all sometimes never it depends on how much how far behind you are you know if the restaurant's really old school and you haven't updated your menu in like 50 years you got to look at it two ways either you need to stay that way and be be Mr authentic traditional or you need to honestly have changed your menu like 20 years ago change it to to match the pace of the style so maybe every 10 15 years but it's not like a total overhaul it's like little things here and there you know what I would love to see you do um I would love to see like a more realistic version um of like I forgot the name of the show but it's like that I think Gordon Ramsay was on it where they flipped like a failing uh restaurant and they'd like change the menu and they do all this stuff but maybe it's more like just the menu part because I think you're really good with food and me I'm sure there's businesses out there that are struggling with the direction of their menu but I think for like a foodie audience that would be really cool and it would bring people to the to the restaurant I agree yeah yeah I think I think that would be fun to do there's so many Concepts that we could do it's just my concern with that is legal ah there's a lot of legal stuff with that you know if something gets messed up and then their restaurant dive bombs not good I got a quick question do you have to have like elevated taste buds to be a good Chef because isn't it true that like like some people are just born with the ability to notice certain flavors that other people wouldn't notice or they're more sensitive to certain things I think it's possible but I don't know that I necessarily have I mean I guess I do but it's hard I mean I started when I was five so it's sort of like it's trained you know it's I've spent so much time I can eat things that aren't that good and in my there's two my brain is in two pieces when I'm eating it and it's and let's say it's bad one part of my brain is like it's food whatever I'm just gonna eat this and the other part of my brain is like this is [ __ ] [ __ ] who the [ __ ] cook this doesn't know what the [ __ ] they're doing I hate every second of this you know but it's like the professional and then the human being kind of like clashing a little bit so I don't know I mean I do think you can train your palate I think anyone can train their palette and I think you can be born with maybe a higher sensitive sensitivity to certain flavors like that's why certain people don't like things like fish or cheese or you know what I mean so I could see that I got more questions random ones okay what do you think about in and out from a foodie oh top tier really loving and out one of my favorite burger places and I I I can tell you why so let me just address the elephant in the room their fries are ass okay yeah but you can order them well done and they're a little better I don't go for the fries I go for the burger first off the price is completely unbeatable unbelievably unbeatable have they raised their prices with inflation or no I know it's still like 2.75 not much though I mean they figured it out food cost you know they figured that out big time but it's more so the whole experience you go to any other burger restaurant it genuinely feels like they sat on the [ __ ] Burger before you ate it I mean every time it is so far away from what you really initially desired that it's just like why the [ __ ] did you even go here but you go to I'm sorry guys I have a foul mouth if it's not evident no you're good I've just realized I'm the only one cussing in here I don't know if that's like a No-No um I work I work we want the guests to be themselves I worked in restaurant industry my entire professional life it's like totally screwed my vocabulary in that sense that being said um so anyway the burger when you get a burger it's just like beautiful every time the presentation it's like perfectly wrapped the lettuce is poking out I mean stylistically when I look at that I eat with my eyes before I eat so I see that I'm like that's great I appreciate that I feel good about eating this they put effort in this and then the flavor is so consistent I mean it's just always good but I don't know maybe it's Nostalgia so I'm gonna raise a point of contention here I actually I think in and out sure yes it's the best fast food Burger yes 100 especially value considered uh but I do think that there can be some variance and inconsistency with not only the flavor but also the texture sometimes I go and the buns are harder than other times but I eat a ton of in and out so I have like a lot oh this guy has like data I don't even have yeah it's got a spreadsheet so it's it's really good but sometimes exactly you'd be surprised there are times where you go and you're just a little underwhelmed you thought you knew what to expect and he's tracking like an inflation chart but it's but it's based off of uh In and Out Burgers exactly it yeah that'd be a fun tweet um yeah I I well you know still is great any restaurant has inconsistency unless it's like a three Michelin if they want to maintain their stars but like most restaurants have inconsistency it's just a matter of how much that how often that's happening I'm I've actually never ran into it I will say half the time I've eaten in and out I might not have been sober yeah be fair sure at 2 am so another question when someone says I want to thank the chef you know did they ever pull you out of the kitchen did that ever happen to you where they had to thank you most of the time in the restaurants that I've worked at the people are kind of afraid of you low-key they're like afraid of disrespecting you which is a really weird power complex that happens in restaurants and I know if there are any line cooks or chefs watching this they absolutely know what I'm talking about where there's a certain you ever go to a nice restaurant you're kind of like okay let me not act stupid one so do you know what I'm talking about then yeah yeah I was a but it wasn't like a nice nice restaurant it was a good Steakhouse yeah and there's but there's like a certain respect people have so a lot of the time they would thank us through the waiter waitress they would tell their waiter waitress oh my God this was really good can you please tell whoever made this and so and you always like throw a little party whenever that happened it was amazing it was the best feeling ever so like I remember I'd be cooking and make and then you know maybe it's really crazy and then they'd go like hey Josh that A5 steak they said they wanted to kiss you and then the whole kitchen like the whole kitchen is just like everyone's like screaming and then um it's like this huge that's one of the beauties of working in a restaurant that's why you get so attached it's like a Brotherhood camaraderie uh and everyone's like yeah yeah like Josh is on fire tonight or like whoever whoever's doing it and then um they'll like sometimes like the other stations will like make food for you and send it out and get send it to your your Station instead of a table and you'd like you know get like a plate as like a reward or something so yeah that's really cool yeah it's a reminder to thank the chef more yeah never really do have you ever done that the way that I think so the way that it uplifts the kitchen is unreal really even if the kitchen's in a bad spot or or even if the kitchen's in a good spot doesn't matter if somebody says if somebody takes the time to go to the kitchen tells you know so and so hey this was really good if it's a healthy kitchen and by healthy I mean like good attitudes and not toxic everyone's gonna get so hype really how often is it though that someone complains or sends something back and you know it's like this is BS it's perfect I hate to say it I haven't worked a lot of restaurants that's happened a ton but it does happen most of the time it's pretty low-key nothing really happens every once in a while it's really bad and they're like you know they want something redone but normally like honestly if they send something back we the restaurants I've worked for were really smart they always were like you don't like it no worries even if they're being a dick we'd just be like cool what would you like that's free you can either eat it or we'll toss it what would you like you want this cool done let me just remake it call it a day we just like extinguished the problem immediately never got exploited like some guy's like oh I could just go and complain every time I come here and get two for that every time well coming in the next day and the next day oh this steak sucks again we've definitely had some stuff like that before we'll throw them out of the restaurant oh interesting yeah cool yeah we'll throw them out of the restaurant and what happens to all the food that gets uneaten because sometimes I see plates oh my God like oh it gets ravaged by the people in the back does it no okay dude I was a busboy so like if any food got sent back you'd know I'm you know I'm eating good chowing down that's nasty bro I know bro what if someone has like has something well you know I like what if they don't I'm tuning my immune system so yeah I got strong smart yeah because of that yeah I hate seeing wasted food like I see when someone gets up and they have half their plate and I'm looking at that thing they could take that home oh no matter I could take that home he has been at a it was a sushi restaurant right and the guy next to you he wasn't finishing his Sushi you went to this man at another table and asked him for the food no way yeah Ram it was half a dare it was many years ago I I joked and I'm like he's not gonna finish that because they paid already and like half the plate was just uneaten it was Sushi and I'm like I wonder if he's gonna finish that like it's gonna get thrown out and it was really good and so a body was like you should just ask him like really you think that's weird he's like not his ass and I think he was on a date too and I'm like no man it's gonna be weird are you gonna finish that and he looks down it's like no I was like can I have it and he's like sure oh my God that guy must have [ __ ] it I bet he still tells that story today yeah I bet he does yeah hey if you're watching on YouTube here he is house in Santa Monica this must have been like 2016. so like it's not that the people will do their magic you guys know what to do find this man for us and he must have been on a first date you should take him on a date first day probably I don't know it seemed like a first date like they gave first aid Vibes I don't know his wife of 50 years or something like that what if that started a fight she's like you shouldn't have gave him the food I wanted it you could have taken that home yeah maybe they're not together anymore because of that yeah maybe there's so many dominant effects that could happen in that moment you never know when food is sent back I never ever wanted to eat it off the plate so that's Wilding to me but that being said um yeah it's usually the waste in restaurants is exorbitant it's Graham if you saw how much waste is in a restaurant it's it's sickening it's sickening it's really bad some restaurants are good about it but even the ones that try to be good at it it is really bad why to the point where uh it depends I mean in fine dining uh this is something that's not talked about a lot in fine dining you know you want everything to be perfect vegetables don't come perfectly shaped you need to cut them to be perfectly shaped meat doesn't come perfectly shaped and you cut it to be perfectly shaped which means what happens to all the trim when you're trimming it down to get a perfect little square on a piece of meat what happens to all the little strips of meat you just cut off right we try to use it doesn't always get reused sometimes it's not reusable it should have a junk plate like every fine dining well maybe not a fine dining like if you have that one table in the junk table well you go there you get a discounted meal it's all the the all the shrimp I mean it's it's funny it's a funny idea it it wouldn't be a bet what I would do I'm giving this [ __ ] away for free this is what I I will be doing so for to-go orders you have a to-go order menu that's totally separate so you have some of your menu items but it's a it's a slightly different menu just for to go orders right you had a couple new items on there that you can't get in-house and then you use the trim to make some of those things so let's say you have a short rib dish right and you're cutting short of all nice and it's like sous-vide for several hours falls apart right you take all that short road trim you shred it up and then you press it into a pan so it's like a flat layer you weigh it down you cut it into little squares or Rod or whatever shape you want you can pan seared it's like a crispy little like shredded Beefcake it's nice make that a To-Go menu item now you've used a trim you didn't throw it away and you made money off of it you you made a better margin on your overall food cost and you provided value with a new item for two orders the expectation is a lot lower to go food it's lower but also you can make something nice out of it if you're creative you can make anything out of anything if you're creative so I think trim can be used but most restaurants don't use it so then when you start to add that up think about like let's say um you know a a trash can right the big restaurant trash cans you know which one I'm talking about the ones that are [ __ ] horrible to fill with the bag let's say six of those get rotated maybe three to four times in a night filled with some garbage but a lot of those items like trim and just stuff that goes bad and vegetables and stuff that falls in the ground when sauce gets spilled which happens all the time I mean that every day almost you know like maybe I don't know 300 days out of the Year even more 350 days out of the year for one restaurant for one restaurant yeah so tons of trash how would you take these experiences for your own restaurant I mean sustainability being ethical paying people really well um I mean trying to it's hard to address them all right if it was easy to address then all restaurants would be doing it it is hard to do so I mean I kind of want to go in with that kind of energy of like trying to hit all those points but let's talk about real quick uh paying people well what do you think about the whole uh tip culture in America do you think that we should just pay servers x amount more and then markup prices x amount more because it's like a a certain level tip should be expected to be able to pay them a certain wage or do you think that no they're a service-based industry like they can make more money by providing excellent service what what's your take on that and uh that does this doesn't mean you would do it but what what model do you think you would do in your your restaurant it's really hard I don't know what model I'm gonna do so I can't I can't say what that is because there's so many decisions that have to go into it um it's tough right because I mean it makes sense why tips exist but I think it sucks that that only waiters and waitresses get the tips what about the people that are cooking the food normally they don't so it's tough when you're like you know let's say uh you know a lead line cook and you've been working at that restaurant for three and a half years and you get paid let's say 13 or 14 an hour um and meanwhile you know a waiter or waitress is making a hundred thousand dollars a year and you're just sitting there like like you don't even care about what you're doing but I'm back here and I've dedicated my entire life to this and I'm really good at it and I make stuff that people love that takes so much time to create like and come up with and like some place some dishes take like months to come up with so I would try to make it in a way that it's Financial it financially behooves everyone as much as possible but I really don't know what it's gonna look like until I start working on the restaurant uh but I I can at least say that that's something that's at top of mind for me for sure for sure yeah I know with sugar fish they do the no tipping it's just it's included I don't even know if it's a a set amount that gets added on I think it's just built into the menu and then you just pay and you're done um but I've also seen a lot about tipping fatigue where I even went to like some random like Supermarket sort of place it was like one of those little convenience stores and just checked out yeah buttons right here buttons right but this was something where it's like just scan a few items and then turn it around it wasn't like a service or anything and I look at that thinking like I don't want to be that guy who's like no tip so I put something but then I'm like is 10 insulting but then again he just turns it around like but but that's everywhere now and I feel like it it's it's turning people off I I heard I think it was valuetainment was mentioning that people are now tipping less because of that feature just overall I could see that yeah it's an oil change and they asked for a tip I swear to God a hand oh we know it was a smog test it wasn't how was your service it was a small 20 no but the thing is it was a cheap smog test like I think it was like 50 like 20 and then when I checked out they had the tip feature and I always whenever they flip the thing around I'm like you know what I'm expecting I'm gonna tip and I always click the middle one whatever it is so my finger a default went to the middle I'm like stupid I'm tipping for a smog test but sure I'll click the middle one and I look and as my finger is pressing it's like 72 percent it was like 52 I think it was like 26.52 and then like 26 was like the bottom the thing yeah but the thing is it was such a cheap oil change I think they like expect people to tip a bunch because it wasn't like like the owner was the one that was like you know that would release or sorry smog test smog test yes the owner of the smog place like was checking me out so the tip would go to him so I basically just paying more for the smog test I wonder if there's got to be like a tax thing going on there like maybe tips are done differently or maybe it's what is it done with stripe I believe it I have no clue maybe they process uh they get probably a fee too on that tip so they're making more money the more you tip because imagine if every one of your transactions now pays on average at 10 more yeah 10 more Revenue just for turning that thing around yeah I could see that yeah that's what that's whack I always think it's funny whenever I go to a coffee shop and then I'm like you know what actually I'm just gonna get like a bottle of juice and a water and like maybe one of the pre-packaged snacks and then I see the tip thing and I'm like do I tip because I just grabbed this out of the refrigerator and then just buy it you know what I wouldn't be bothered as much by it if it weren't Anonymous but I know like they see it and they turn around and I'm always like just you know that's exactly it and the thing is that's another thing because you're known as like all the millionaire guy yeah I don't want to be like when I when I checked out at the smog thing I I pushed it was like 52 I think I recognized me so it ended up working in my favor yeah oh wow yeah my fiance and I now like sometimes uh you know I don't know if we like watch a movie or something and I'll be like oh come on like you know let's go watch you know TV show or something for like an hour and then we'll watch something and then right afterwards she'll pull out the iPad or something and be like [Laughter] I always wonder like like when is it gonna slow down like what other I don't know businesses are they gonna extend that whole tipping thing too it's smog test it's even on YouTube now have you seen the tip feature on YouTube yeah what yeah yeah you can turn it on I recommend turning it on your channel every now and then people will send you a tip and I get a notification on my phone that like so-and-so's tip and you could tip anything from like a dollar to I don't know a few hundred but when I see that little tip feature I'm like you know usually it's with a comment then I'll respond back but yeah I just thought of the next level business idea what so when I invoice Graham I'm just gonna do it in person and I'm gonna do it safely and you know what he knows me so so I'm gonna judge him based on it and I'm gonna make the middle one like 52 yeah it's gonna be on it's I'm turning the camera turn the camera on on the screen too so you can see his reaction yeah it's it's gonna be on um on paychecks too I guarantee like no they'll find a way to give that to employers rate though is that not a bonus bonus seems too formal but a tip seems like hey you did a good job this week let me uh that's a bonus I think when I think bonus I think of a performance bonus or I think end of year bonus or like something like that but I think just on if let's say you're paid every other week you wouldn't get a bonus every other week it's just yeah I don't know I could see this extending it's like a relaxed bonus for sure yeah an informal bonus but a bonus I feel like is something you would expect or work towards yeah I wouldn't be surprised honestly at this point yeah you know but I mean businesses are more and more every year businesses are kind of getting more uh I feel like picked apart in a way which for the good and maybe not for the good at the same time I don't know I don't know if you have an opinion on that I feel like with Twitter um being what it is I just feel like businesses are kind of being pushed more to be more ethical and better in many good ways but then there's other elements where I'm like why is anyone even talking about this just like go [ __ ] get a job go you know what I mean or I don't know give me an example I don't know I don't know I've seen some of the Drew Gooden was it drew good news talking about the the Twitter Wars between companies oh I never saw that yeah basically companies like um Taco Bell were getting in arguments with like Del Taco over like this stuff on Twitter I think it's hilarious Home Depot will be I think that's what he's talking about what are you thinking what am I thinking about yeah what are you talking about you were talking about like companies trying to I mean how do I put this no I was thinking I was thinking broad stroke from like uh yeah from like employee to company rather than a company we're talking about different things yeah yeah yeah so well because we were wait what were we originally talking about that I that I leaned into this uh tipping yeah so like you're talking about bonus structure tipping and all these different things I feel like in general from a society standpoint because of like Twitter there's a lot of conversation around like trying to be more ethical and being better for you know the people yeah and being less geared towards you know these Mass monopolies and how do we make people's lives better which I think is good and important it's just like but there's sometimes you see a tweet where you're just like I don't know about that like that seems like it's not a good addition to the club and so when you start talking about like tipping here tipping there it's like at what point do we draw the line you know what I mean is it going to be drawn at thank you so much for my ibuprofen the receipt's going to be that long yeah yeah somehow they'll find a way to make it longer I don't know I don't think there's ever going to be a line that's drawn I think it's constantly going to be pushed and moved around and it's just gonna be whatever the general sentiment is at the time I think people they're getting to the breaking point because people are finally starting to talk about the that's true the Tipping thing now it's starting to happen good point yeah and uh I think that there will be an uprising a tipping Revolution so you mean more tipping or or or I think people are going to be like no more tips like no like like tipping where tipping is reasonable yeah the thing is like if I check out uh it doesn't happen at Starbucks but some like you know I get an acai Bowl Starbucks now does tipping they do yeah yeah yeah but no um I don't know I think I think that there will be an uprising and people will be like okay I'm not gonna do this anymore yeah at least where it's it's uh you know not not necessarily like people aren't performing a long service for you but you know what everywhere you go people provide a service like imagine going to your doctor's office and you have a tip thing oh my God it's just it's everything is a service for a tip I would lose my mind just perform the surgery how happy were you with your service yeah yeah but they asked for the tip beforehand yeah doc you make 500 000 a year I'm not tipping you sorry it's just weird how like an acai Bowl could be a 25 tip and that's like the middle button right and then you go to a restaurant the person's literally serving You Porn doing all this stuff and the difference in service is just like crazy yeah but and although yeah sure the price of the acai Bowls the actual monetary gain for the percentage Yeah but it's the same percentage Yeah which for me effort doesn't really make sense it's effort it's effort and time yeah and time like and a waiter or waitress is serving you for an hour at least this is uh uh some you know I I here's the thing I don't want to say anything that would make it feel like a service uh somebody working in service doesn't deserve to make more money I think they need more money I think it's good I think tipping is good and I want them to get tipped but it's like it's not really being measured appropriately is what I think or at least accurately why not like 5 10 you know 15 12 or something like that but then again the price is lower though that's the other thing but the service is lower that's true but the ultimate tip is also going to be lower every time if you go to well I guess maybe not with a coffee shops 20 bucks yeah yeah yeah I don't know I feel like you could probably generate potentially more in a coffee shop because there's a line it's just like boom boom boom boom boom I think what would make sense is if the tips were pooled and they went to everybody then it might feel better but I feel like the tips with restaurants that are the biggest problem is that they go to one person they didn't your restaurants they didn't tip out the buses and whatnot did I always assumed it they actually tipped the kitchen no so in mind that the chefs would get tipped as well as actually they were the only people that worked in the restaurant that got paid higher than minimum wage the chefs at my restaurant not the ones that I worked at interesting yeah there was no tipping for that as far as I remember I I don't ever remember being tipped but there are more places doing it there are new restaurants that are actually having chefs be waiters at the same time they would cook their food and then they would run food and then they would get tipped out so they'd get their their salary or hourly and then they would get tipped out as well that's got to be so stressful if you're good dancing both okay well usually it's with the way that you systematize the line and everything like you basically switch off I think I've never worked in a restaurant like that but I've heard about it so I'm not sure how the full system works but it's cool yeah make more money yeah so I just have two things to say here before we we wrap up the episode the first I just want to thank Lexar my official card sponsor what happens take the card out of my camera I did yes what why do you think why is it missing because you're the only person who takes cards out of cameras around it uh no Jack don't you dare try it again with my card in that camera my fam I had myself anyway somebody took my Lexar card I'm gonna be asking Max art if they would send me another one but I'll take another one I want one too sorry Alexa you want a Lexar card Josh yeah sure oh okay sure so anyway thank you Lexar but the next thing that I want to mention is uh Josh actually during this podcast um I actually thought of the perfect um uh Christmas gift for my wife so I ordered your cookbook oh yeah coming today but if she asks you gave it to me on this podcast and it was a gift because I'm not trying to send any mixed messages okay so I just need you to back me up on that okay it would have been amazing hey would you have been able to sign it yes yes why don't you do this you can keep that book and then I'll send all you guys books oh my gosh that would be great done that would be cool that would be amazing yeah be happy thank you thank you so much I also have some bankroll coffee for you too yeah we'll link to your info uh in the description along with your cookbook I'm excited to get that yeah it'll be fun you guys will get I'll send a little couple things so you guys send you some salt you know what I could get uh Nick digiovanni's salt oh no no no no no no no no no what's that no you got your own song well now I have to make my own salt for you man come on come on come on Nick's a good guy he's a sweet guy so huh what do you think of him he's a good guy yeah well I mean I don't know Nick's background to be honest um I don't I don't know I mean he's a Master Chef he was one of the finalists I know that yeah yeah I don't know what restaurants he worked at though um but I know that he I think he's cooked in food before but I met him once and we had a we had a really good time we like chatted for a little bit you should be doing a collab with him I think that blow up the internet yeah see imagine YouTube going uh going off against uh Gordon Ramsay and he's the one who like taste tests the food yeah that'd be fun no you gotta include all the guys you gotta have googa you gotta have babish yeah all those guys yeah all competing for this like the Marvel universe that would be a Matt Stoney eating it yeah that would be insane Matt Stoney passes away amazing yeah well thank you guys for having me on the phone thank you Tony appreciate it thank you guys so much make sure to get your free stuff down in the description public.com wow their sponsor usually speak over each other yes all the time yeah guys follow me on Instagram real quick thank you so much episode when people are shouting out stuff we always interrupt the other person shouting out