C.K. Chin and Joe Rogan dive into birthdays, food culture, and communal dining—like Swiss Attic’s family-style struggles during the pandemic—while debating purism vs. adaptability in dishes like buffalo wings or ketchup on hot dogs. They link culinary creativity to tribal identity, echoing QAnon psychology and media distrust, like CNN’s partisan attacks under Trump, and question how algorithm-driven sensationalism distorts truth. Ultimately, the conversation reveals how survival instincts, whether in cooking or belief systems, often clash with nuance in modern life. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, at the end of the day, for me, it's like, it's opportunity cost.
The amount of time that it would, like, why ruin this person's experience?
This person, you know, it's, we are, if you're truly in this, like, I'm in the hospitality industry for the purest reasons which I really enjoy taking care of people.
So if somebody hands you a roadmap on how to make them happy, Use it.
Where's the goal?
What do I win?
There's nobody keeping score of some sort of global scoreboard that says that you were right and this customer's wrong.
It's like, no, who cares?
You gave me that opportunity to make you happy by giving you a drink and you get to tell your friends that I got a free drink and go for it.
I think that if there's some people out there that's maybe just trying to get one up on somebody and trying to get some free stuff and whatever like that, you know they're just taking advantage of you.
It was because I was born in September, and then my family wasn't like, well...
We're supposed to wait another year.
And they're like, nope.
We'll put you in a Montessori school.
We'll get you started now.
And then went into school.
And my last year in high school, they switched over to this block scheduling thing.
So I ran out of classes.
And my family, also my mother, we put me in summer school every year.
Because she heard about summer school and was like, yeah, go to school.
Continue going to school.
And I ran out of classes.
And so I was able to take some college classes and then I got accepted into college and went that summer before I turned 17. What was that like being around a bunch of fucking grown-ass kids when you're basically 16?
I was an old man.
It's weird.
I have this kind of juxtaposition, I feel like, too, of my upbringing and everything like that.
I think I was forced to kind of grow up a little bit faster with a single parent.
My grandmother raised me and then having to help with my sister and everything.
But I'm also very childlike in that way because I think a lot of that kind of got...
It's taken away a little bit.
So I still enjoy cartoons and Marvel movies or whatever it is and these type of things, this escapism stuff that I feel like I just never really kind of fully got out of the way.
And so it's like you grew up fast and now it's like you're making up for lost time and doing that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I think you have a better understanding, and again, not to get so super deep on superhero movies, but I think there is something that really kind of shines a mirror on people.
If you have this blank canvas and be able to create something as to whatever you wanted, and then you can create this person.
It's kind of interesting.
I remember, I forgot, there's an essay going around or something that's talking about Superman, for instance, and how...
There is some interesting psychology behind it, the idea that everyone on Krypton is Superman and his alter ego is actually a human as opposed to every other Superhero's alter ego is their superhero, but he actually has to pretend to be normal because he just himself is, you know, whatever.
It's like this weird kind of thing.
And I remember reading that kind of stuff and thinking about that and thinking about how like most recently I think Spider-Man, they finally cast a young guy as opposed to like a grown man.
And there was like what kind of stuff would you go through as a teenager that all of a sudden discovered that you have all this stuff going on?
And they did a good job in the most recent movies about him going to high school and telling his best friend and getting caught about it and getting all this stuff.
I feel like there's like as an adult watching it is not the same.
Yeah, I think that there's a time, like, when people would come by and say, this didn't have any, it's like, are you arguing the realism, like, the people who pick it apart like that?
It's a small upstairs spot that was very kind of...
Aiming towards crowded, high-energy sharing food, which is probably the least type of place that you want to open up in the last two years.
That dynamic really exposed like, yeah, this is not what I think a lot of people want.
But as we've kind of gauged into it, calmed down a little bit and spread some people out a little bit, I think people are obviously more okay with it now.
But early on, it was like, man, how in the world are we going to pivot from this?
One of the other groups I'm a partner with at Native, right over here on the east side, It was a hostel.
And the entire vibe was to go and stay in a room with a bunch of strangers and meet people.
But when we tried to pivot – sorry, when we tried to reopen and it was like, all right, well, let's keep people safe and spread out the beds and make sure the beds are socially distant and all this other stuff.
I mean the first night that we opened, the first person that sneezed in the middle of their night, we got a call that was like, I need to move rooms.
At one point, pre-pandemic, we were doing very well because I think it was a nicer...
It wasn't a cot and you paid for a blanket for a dollar.
It wasn't for economic purposes.
It was really for the social purposes.
The idea that you're traveling by yourself in the city you don't know in and it's possible that you'll end up staying in a room with some really interesting people or some people who are also traveling by themselves and have nothing to do.
So there's a bar right outside.
So the hostel, the native is also a bar.
And we'd have a DJ on a Friday night, so you'd just go, hey, you want to go and grab a drink kind of thing.
It's kind of a forced interaction.
I think if you're traveling, especially if you're traveling, it helps kind of lubricate that trip rather than forcing you to go out to a bar and then walk into it and that kind of stuff.
But, you know, in our conversation of it, it was a cultural thing.
It was the idea that we should take this culture of the kind of person that likes to travel that way, that likes to meet random people or to, you know, to just kind of roll the dice on that.
You know, there is true.
I mean, it's a couple people for whatever reason.
If you have that mentality to be able to say that the odds are that somebody else is in this room, has this exact same mentality, you're kind of ahead of the game.
These are six people that probably have similar situations than you as opposed to at a hotel where...
Who knows why somebody's there?
But here, the odds are you're saying, look, I'm not super concerned about my privacy.
I'm staying in my own little private room.
I'm a social kind of cat because I picked this one place that has a bar in it and doing concerts, DJs, whatever, that kind of energy.
I'm also looking to, you know, experience Austin in this kind of way, which they on the east side, like a lot of the little checkboxes that check off to say that this is a kind of person that I am.
I described it as like it's an oasis of where, you know, you'll see a rhino and a zebra and they're all just there.
There's no reason why we're all there.
We just haven't all gathered there.
But that was the kind of concept was saying that, all right, we like that aspect of the culture, but we also don't like the idea that this is a place where you're trying to – somebody save money.
So it's like you're going for a $19 bed.
So you're trying to save money while you're backpacking through Europe.
that kind of experience is a totally different need for a hostel as opposed to this one.
It just says, you know, we're paying $40 a bed, $50 a bed, but there's four beds, six beds in that room.
But if you, let's say it was a lot of people were groups of four that would rent a room with four beds in it, and you're getting a downtown hotel for, you know, 160 bucks.
And it's on the east side right there as opposed to, you know, $400 at the Four Seasons or something.
One of the things I liked about doing Stubbs when we were doing shows there was you would always come by with all kinds of different food from different restaurants.
You really celebrate all the local places and establishments and it seemed like you would really take pride in bringing us like these burgers from this one local spot or pizza from another local spot or that kind of stuff.
I mean, I met Dave years ago, got introduced to him through Questlove, Amir, who's a friend of mine, who's also a foodie, and we met through food as well.
And I just remember he was coming here, and, you know, no...
Shade on corporate type restaurants, but it was like one of the conversations we have, especially per people who are on tour, it's like you can a lot of times that kind of experience is comforting.
Like it's like but people eat McDonald's on the road because it always tastes exactly the same or whatever it is.
But at the same time, I'm like, if you had somebody to just guide you through whatever city you're in, like, why wouldn't you like why?
Why would you?
Go to Philly and not have a Tony Luke's or something like that.
Like when I go there and I ask somebody who lives in Philly, they'll definitely say don't go to Pat's and Geno's or whatever it is because that's a tourist trap.
You know, whatever it is.
And so it's like the same thing.
They would sit there and say where should we go eat and then find out that they ended up going to You know, like one of the nights was Shake Shack.
Shake Shack's great.
I like Shake Shack's burgers.
But it's like we have local burger spots that are dope that would love to have a chance to serve and expand their audience of people who had to experience their food.
I think that there's a textural, caramelizational type thing that happens when that happens.
And I think it's the combo, that squishy bun, that cheese, American cheese.
There's something nostalgic about that, I think, for me, as opposed to the steakhouse burger, which I'm like, if I'm at a steakhouse, I'm going to eat a steak.
You know, I'll do the whole backyard barbecue style with the bread, some potato salad, some slaw, some cream corn, some briskets, mac and cheese, whatever, and make it into this amalgam weird white bread burrito type thing and take at least a bite of that.
He has a legal pad like this written down with all the briskets and the time when they're wrapping them and they're spraying them with apple cider vinegar.
And that science to that is fundamentally mind-blowing because It's like during the pandemic when everybody was fucking with sourdough bread and I was just experimenting.
Everyone was doing sourdough because we couldn't find yeast anywhere.
So people were starting to fuck around sourdough.
And then for me at least, especially anybody who has any sort of desire, culinary type stuff, I was trying to do stuff that took, if it took normally 30 minutes, I tried to make it take 8 hours.
Like, for instance, I made a BLT sandwich where I cured my own bacon.
So curing is kind of the chemical process of basically using salt or some sort of other, you know, salt and a mix of other things to draw out moisture to kind of preserve it.
Yeah, just because of the way that the smoke has to cool down.
There's some science behind that.
But that was it.
What I was going with was saying, with that time, you don't know you messed up until a day later.
You know, half a day.
So those type of cooking experiences, I don't even understand how people...
How do you get good at that?
Because I remember I opened up a sushi bar...
Years ago and when we were doing taste testing for the rice and the chef was, you know, cook a batch of rice with some kombu and a little this and a little that and that.
But every batch took an hour or so.
And the batch had to come up.
We had to let it cool.
We had to cut the vinegar in there and then taste it and go, nah, that's too sweet.
And so we'd have to start our process over again.
So to taste four batches of rice took us seven hours or whatever it was.
We're just waiting for the rice to get done.
And so it's like these type of things, like there's really a lesson in patience because that's the thing.
It's like you're trying to do brisket.
I don't know, until the next morning and then you come back and say, oh, the fire was too hot.
That whatever it is, the adjustment of recognizing when something is one way or when something is next.
You just get better at it, right?
You just get better at it.
But you have to know what you did wrong.
That was the part.
So with making with bread, I don't know what I did wrong.
I'd make two loaves two days apart because it takes all day to rise it and fold it and all this stuff.
And then one day it'd be great, and the next day it'd be flat.
And I don't know what I did wrong.
I don't know if the AC was turned on too high, if I was too aggressive with it, if I needed it too much, needed it not enough.
And so that takes some mentorship there for someone like an Aaron or someone like, you know, somebody from, you know, La Barbecue, like Allie, to come back and sit there and tell me, hey...
You see right there, you see that jiggle, you need to turn the fire up, or you need to spritz it a little bit less, or this little thing, or put this one in the back where it's hotter, and put this one in the forward, and you gotta do this or whatever.
And that comes from experience too, but at the end of the day, they don't teach that aspect until you have to be standing right next to you.
Yeah, the massive amount of time spent barbecuing.
Yeah.
Those folks that you talked about, like La Barbecue or Franklin's or Terry Black's, just the sheer volume of knowledge that they have in specific dishes.
I mean, if you look at their menu, they cook like 10 things.
But that is the reason why it's here, is German immigrants moved to Texas and then they were smoking meat and then just started changing it and adding.
Well, it's the difference between like East Coast Italian food versus Italian food from Italy.
There's a great documentary called The Search for General Tso.
And they go back and show this dish to a bunch of people in China and Taiwan and all the places.
And they're like, I've never even heard that before in my life.
That's interesting.
But it is.
It was brought in by immigrants and it was a cooking thing where they made adjustments to the...
The demographic they're cooking for, they made it a little bit sweeter, they had access to, you know, a perfect example is American broccoli is typically served with general sauce chicken, but that broccoli doesn't exist.
The big florets, that broccoli really doesn't exist in China proper.
You know, we have Gailan, that's why they call it Chinese broccoli, you know, that type of...
That's what typically we cook with.
And then when you have access to it here, it's like, well, they use that instead.
But, yeah, it's like – but that dish, for instance, it's – and so there's no – I mean, fortune cookies or sweet and sour pork.
It is – I think that the Chinese food had this, you know – Where you get your salinity from soy sauce and you get sweetness from, you know, rock sugar or you add sour from vinegar and this kind of sweet and sour or spicy, salty, that kind of this type of blending of foods.
And it's like I think that when you make that connection and somebody else makes a dish, something like that, then you're like, oh, that has an Asian type flavor because...
Soy sauce tastes the same when it cooks in a certain way at high heat, that type of stuff.
So you can invent a complete different dish and call it Asian-ish.
You can put soy sauce and ginger and sesame seeds on a burger and it's like, well, there's something Asian about this thing.
I like the idea of thinking if somebody got here, met up, married, was in a community with some Italian folks, and then saw this and decided to use some Chinese flavors and ingredients to do it, but not just this chimera for no reason, just to just...
Force things together.
I laugh a lot at the Asian chicken salad.
And we're like, why is this Asian?
And then it's like, well, we put mandarin oranges in it and wonton crisps and ginger.
But then for us, it's like as a business, we're like, well, let's give them something that's a little bit like, you know, we still have a fried rice on our menu.
That's just me.
If you want a chicken fried rice at Wuchow, you can.
There's a lot of better things, you know.
But if that's what you're used to eating, then let's do it.
We cook rice and then put it back in the fridge for the next day to cook our fried rice.
Because you want it to dry out so that when you cook it with all this extra moisture and oil and soy sauce and everything like that, it plumps back up to normal, not mushy, the next day.
So the intention is I've got all these little scraps and bits and leftover little bits of the barbecue that we did or the little chicken dish that we had.
Add an egg in there and have some old rice that we had from the night before, cook it up again, and then it's like a casserole.
In Chinese, when you say eat, in reality, the words that you literally say, which means to eat rice.
So in Chinese culture, the food all hits the middle of the table and we each have our bowl of rice.
And the intention is to just grab a little bit of this and eat it with the rice and a little bit of this, eat it with the rice.
And that's kind of the thing.
So when you share all these different dishes, that's the intention.
You always order six, seven different dishes.
Like when we eat out as a family, It's like we just order a big table full of food and then we all have our own little rice bowl and then we all just eat a little bit of everything.
So that was a very pure level of cultural way that we culturally eat.
It actually makes no sense for you and I to go, you and Jamie, to go eat and say, I'll get the beef with broccoli, whatever it is.
And then for you to say, oh, that sounds good.
I'll have that also.
That philosophy doesn't exist in Chinese culture.
It's like, what are we ordering for the table?
Because we're all going to have rice.
This is the dish that we want.
If there's something that you want, order for the table.
I'll have some too.
And so for me, it was very important to kind of do that.
Matter of fact, Swift's even has that philosophy.
I never liked that idea.
I'm the guy, if you and I were all eating dinner, and then you ordered the lamb chops, and I was like, oh, I was going to get that.
Well, I'll get something else, because I would like, let's trade.
Let's share some of this.
That concept is very kind of Western, as opposed to the Eastern way, which all hits the center of the table.
Yeah, for me, it's just more of like, especially with new restaurants, older restaurants, sure, you'd order what you want, but with new restaurants, I'm like, I want to try seven things on the menu.
I want to try, I want to get a gamut of how this restaurant really is.
And I can't obviously eat six different steaks, so if we all each, if the six of us all get a different steak and we all each get a little bit of it, then at least we can all determine which one we really like at the end of the day.
Yeah, we were talking before the podcast about some folks that get upset at your restaurant if you serve them a fish with the head on it, which is crazy.
And you just don't want to come to, you don't want to look face to face with, like, the cruelty that is that we are part of this top of the food chain rather than the bottom of it.
Apparently, I don't know the exact reasoning for it, but, like, Wingstop is now called—they have Thighstop because they're doing fried thighs now with— Why are there more thighs than there are wings?
Well, how many wings do you sit down in a sitting?
And so you think about it, when I had it, being ignorant of the invention of it, you'd think that, wow, this was like soba noodles, and people have been doing it for hundreds of years.
The dude that invented that dish is alive.
His shop is in Japan right now.
It's like in the 70s or something.
It's just weird that somebody could invent, like if you just walked and met the guy who decided to sell chicken wings from the Anchor Pub, whatever, the Anchor Pub in Buffalo.
We yuck each other's yum in a very weird way, in a very consistent and broad way where you can go up to somebody and if somebody's wearing stripes and polka dots and you sit there and go, what are you doing?
Yeah, and a lot of the cultures, the longer-range cultures.
And then somehow we harnessed fire and then we started roasting stuff.
And then boiling had to come after that because you had to have some sort of vessel to boil water, which has got to be fundamentally crazy to think of who could do that.
Then somebody accidentally tried to boil something in a bunch of rendered beef fat or something.
And realize it made shit crispy.
How mind-blowing must have that been?
Like, imagine if you just lived your entire life and didn't have a french fry until you're 40-something years old.
Again, if you really look at it, if you talk to somebody who knows the history of this kind of stuff, I don't know the growth, the trajectory of agriculture as to when potatoes were even...
So you'll take like some water from a puddle like this and you have a UV wand and you just stir the UV light through the water for X amount of minutes and it kills everything.
The problem is it still tastes like cow piss or whatever the fuck you're actually drinking.
I mean, say what you will, I think that's one thing that this whole last couple years put in perspective is, like, we really, you know, we're living in a pretty magical time.
Like, it's really still the best it's ever been, you know?
I mean, even with the pandemic, look, when we think about how many people got really, really sick during this pandemic but survived through the magic of modern medicine, and then...
Learned at the end of it, like, wow, how valuable is my health?
I'm going to start doing something.
I'm going to start walking every day.
I'm going to start eating.
A lot of people went right back to eating bullshit.
A lot of people got real close to death and they were real scared and they went right back to being fucking sloppy.
And it's sad, but a lot of people didn't.
A lot of people just started recognizing, you know what?
I am more robust if I'm thinner, if I'm healthier, if I'm eating good food, I'm taking in nutrients and vitamins, and I'm exercising on a regular basis, the quality of my life improves, I'm more resilient.
And if something does happen, you bounce back far quicker.
And if there's anything that we learned from this pandemic, it's that.
I mean, there's all sorts of disputes about the numbers, but at least at one point in time, it was 78% of the people who were in the ICU with COVID were obese.
And I think it's part and parcel with your success, though.
I think that you talk about the wherewithal to do that is also the wherewithal for you to do what you do.
I have a lot of friends of mine that have come up to me.
Over the years, and they've talked to me and wanted advice about opening up their own bar or whatever like that, but these guys also still sleep till 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
I've had 10 meetings already.
If you don't have that drive, then I don't know how to get that for somebody.
It's just like the opposite is true for fitness for other people.
The people that get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, get a workout in, like yourself.
And I'm just like, I can't complain about not being in this tip-top shape if I don't have the wherewithal for me to kind of do that kind of stuff, to devote to that kind of thing.
Yeah, because it's a rock-solid habit with me now, but it's helped me in the past tremendously, especially when there's a lot of things on that list.
And I know I've got to get those things done, but I could just fuck off and watch YouTube for an hour, and then I'll miss two or three of those things that I'm supposed to be doing.
Because a couple things is, number one, I don't know about you, but for me, I eat less when I cook.
The entire thing myself whether it's the work that it took into it or tasting it or looking at it all like when I go to a restaurant I'll overeat but at home after I cook my entire meal or whatever the tendencies for me to eat less it's just very that's interesting I wonder why yeah I don't know it might be a restaurant thing maybe because I do it for a living it's like don't get high on your own supply type thing I don't know what it is but it's just when I host people when I serve if you ever come to my house and I'll cook for 30 people or whatever it is The tendency is for me,
I might not even fix myself a plate after cooking for two and a half hours.
I was like, I don't even want to look at it anymore.
So to figure out that balance, like a good jerk seasoning or something like that, it's like, man, you want to be able to taste the pimento and taste the smoke and taste the...
You can't just light people up for no reason.
It's like there's got to be some depth to it, and I like that layers of that kind of stuff.
I love a hot, spicy carne asada taco with a lot of kick.
If I had one food, it might be Mexican.
If I really had to choose one food.
There's some, like, Mexican comfort food, like tacos and burritos and quesadillas, like, there's something about Mexican with the spices and the use of the cheeses and the...
I think that universally speaking, there's something with...
Especially foods, I think, that take time, that there's some comfort there.
And it's just something like that.
It's marination or barbecuing or slow roasting or whatever it is.
There's the idea of fast food out of convenience, but...
That's not, it's weirdly, you know, I don't think it's as comforting.
Now, some people might argue and sit there and say McDonald's is comforting as hell, but I think that's the nostalgic stuff that talks to you about is saying, grow up, and it goes back to somewhere in your brain that brings you up to making you feel like a kid again.
It might be just the sugar.
But at the end of the day, I think that when you have a culture that makes a soup that takes eight hours or spaghetti sauce or some sort of roast that took all day or a pig roasted something that took all day, that translates into a comfort.
Those flavors really kind of pinpoint something, I think.
That's what is one of the philosophical things that always blows my mind is like the idea of like, I wonder, like, just like you can't, I can't tell what color you're seeing.
And I think that we talk about it also, we touched on it offline too, is that Without this interaction in social media, you and I sitting down and having a conversation right now, I can see your reactions.
And so much of that communication is that way.
But after this is done, there's going to be a lot of people that just lob comments at us, that we don't look at their face.
They don't see us reading it or if we read it or not.
They don't care.
I saw that with...
So when I got sick in January with Dave and all them, And the amount of people, the comments that we're getting, I had to turn off my comments just because my phone was draining from battery.
I don't even know how you live, how people at your level of reach live when you have another 12 million comments or whatever it is.
But it's just kind of like, these are real humans on Earth.
Unless you think that they're bots, unless they're really like robots out there just making weird-ass comments.
But there's somebody out there who...
Took their phone and took a moment, saw something and decided to just say something, some hateful shit.
And it's like they would never say that to somebody to their face.
Like I've developed a discipline, and that discipline is to treat people as nicely as possible, interact with people in as pleasant a way as possible, as friendly a way as possible, work at it.
Like it's a thing that I work at.
I put effort to be nice to people.
And then I'm not taking in any of that negative shit.
I'm not reading from people that I don't know, reading from a bunch of sloppy, lazy thinkers who are just shitty online.
There's so many of those people.
And there's so many people that are addicted to other people's reactions online.
I express myself so often because of the podcast and I'm overwhelmed by the amount of feedback that comes my way.
So I don't have any desire to express myself in any extra ways.
But there's a lot of people out there that are just addicted to likes and comments and interacting with people in this weird sort of shallow peripheral way, this surface way.
It's a very unhealthy way of spending your time interacting with people.
And occasionally it bleeds off into real life, and you see people treat people and talk to people in real life the way they do online, and it's rude, and it's awful, and you see it, and it's just like, it's jarring.
Yeah, I was saying, as people went back out into public after being locked down for a little bit, I mean, people have gone feral.
Some people have really kind of...
I mean that where people are already having difficulty communicating and then forcing that kind of isolation for a little bit coming out.
It is very – it's difficult.
I mean I'll say 100 percent like even when – and you asked me to come talk and – And it was like, you know, I was like, what are we going to talk about?
Imposter syndrome?
Like, I feel like, what am I doing here?
You know, there's a part of me that sits there that says, like, you know, what do I have to contribute?
Because, you know, for me, there is a humility that comes from...
That I think that a lot of people just don't have.
Because people have given everybody a voice.
Everyone has this voice.
And you're allowed to just express yourself.
And it's very equal.
Say what you will, but everyone is hoping for some level of recognition.
Especially someone like yourself that has a platform.
So if I message something jarring enough, then maybe a bunch of people will see it also.
I think that there's something there about saying that.
I really enjoy that aspect of restaurants and stuff, too, is the people who just really love it.
That's a big difference.
I think there's a difference between somebody leaning into a trend to make money versus somebody who has something to say.
I think that restaurants, to me, that was the hard part about this.
I'll give you an example.
The root of hospitality, the people who are the best at it.
I think we all have this need to serve and to take care of people, like when the big freeze happened.
Even Zoom back before that, right when we all shut down in March.
Yeah.
open again, like how all of us, we had a Zoom call with 50 restaurant owners that were like, "Are we done?
Are we dead in the water?" Kind of thing.
But then one of those conversations was at the end of that meeting was, "What are we going to do with thousands of dollars of product that we're just going to go to waste?" And so a lot of it, we just like, well, we're going to send it home with a lot of our employees that lost their job.
We're going to cook up a bunch of it.
Anybody who lost their job in the community to come and get free, come get the food from us so we don't go to waste.
We'll go send it out and send it out into the community and feed our community.
I think the best of us all openly did that.
Seeing major restaurants to the food trucks, we all did the same thing.
But I'll tell you, the one thing that also, I think, put in perspective a lot of people, as I hope, is I had a couple friends of mine that were panicking about and then would look in their pantry or whatever.
It's like, I don't know what...
You have nine months worth of food.
Probably, right?
You know what I mean?
That was a thing where it's like, why are these people scrambling?
And again, this is a conversation of we are living in a great time for a lot of people.
If you just zoom back a little bit, individually we all have our issues.
It's like, man, we are living in a time of abundance.
When this first thing went down, first thing I just opened up my cabinet and I was like, alright, I've got a 25 pound bag of rice.
You know, it's interesting if you stop and think about how many people rely on fast food for a large percentage of their meals, if that was eliminated.
If you cut out all the Chick-fil-A and McDonald's and Jack in the Box and all that stuff, if, like, that was off the menu.
I wonder how different people's lives would be and how differently they would think about food.
Because for so many people, hungry means I'm going to pull into this drive-thru and I'm going to order and then in five minutes I'm going to be eating a sandwich.
So if that wasn't available and you had to really think about food in terms of nourishment and then preparation and like if there was no fast food, imagine if there's a food supply, it's not a problem, but there's no more restaurants.
And I think that there's also something to be said about The care of cooking yourself, the sitting around a table, sharing a meal or something.
These are things that I valued a lot.
Having a restaurant was recognizing that aspect because our family celebrated, we mourned, we had difficult conversations around food.
That was the thing around some food.
And so you people come into town, we bring them.
It's always about food.
Everything is about food.
And so that was my upbringing.
And so I recognized that.
I remember one of the crowning moments in my, like, happy moments in my restaurant career was I remember this family brought in their son for freshman orientation.
And then four years later, brought him in for their graduation dinner.
I remember watching this kid like, oh my god, has it been four years?
Wow.
He graduated.
Like, holy shit.
And then the honor for me to sit there and say that you chose to come back.
And he said this is one of his favorite restaurants.
He wanted to kind of bookend his experience here in Austin.
And it was really something that really touched me in that way, you know, more so than the kind of person who has a million dollars in their bank and just can eat wherever they want and just spend money.
It's like, no, it's like this person really enjoyed what we're doing.
It's gotta be cool when you're there on like a busy Saturday night and you're looking out at this restaurant, all these people having a great time, and you are providing them meals.
I say it's probably the closest and I think that's why I relate to entertainers, musicians.
Because I think the same thing when everyone's laughing at something that you said or singing along to the music that you wrote.
And that's one of the things I think I related because I think the creative process to doing all that other stuff is very similar to cooking.
You know, I think that the reason why I relate to musicians in that way also is the recognition of being able to kind of pull from this database of knowledge of what this is supposed to sound like and that and realizing that these three things sound good together, these three things taste together.
I had a conversation before where watching, I had a chance to watch one of my friends who's a producer produce a track and he was like, Playing this track and then he all of a sudden was like, oh!
And he reached in his bag and got a flash drive and put it in and pulled this sound, this little zzzz sound, whatever it is, and put it in there and slowed it down and blah blah blah and threw it in there.
And then the epiphany moment was when we were doing testing at the menu and then we were cooking something and we were tasting it and then he's like, lemons.
We need lemon zest, right?
Not lemon juice, not lemon segments, not lime.
He's just been able to pull from this pallet out of the ether and said that this dish would be good with some lemon zest in it.
And the best chefs are able to do that.
If you watch like Master Chef and these amazing chefs, when they're blind tasting those 60 ingredients, and they can be like hoisin, sesame oil, pepper, white pepper, Szechuan peppercorns, that's a habanero, nope, that's serrano, it's greener.
Whatever it is, and to be able to have that on demand.
And again, every entertainer has that palette.
You as a comedian have that palette.
You know what's funny and what's not funny.
Whether you know scientifically why, but you know the timing of it all.
And hanging out with people who do this for a living, I see the creative process, and it's so fascinating to me.
Because I think if you go and watch a show...
It sounds amazing that it feels like it's the first time you've ever said those words.
But after you watch 10 in a row, I start to see little nuances that you're like, well, this hit better when I said it this way.
And I emphasized this word instead of that word.
And that kind of stuff was what made me come back day after day to watch it over and over again.
Because I was like, man, this is fucking fascinating to see the psychology behind that.
Or as working through jokes...
That might have started off when we're like, man, that joke didn't work, but by the end of it was like fucking...
There's this weird trial and error, and then there's so many different variables that come into play, like your own attitude, whether you approach a subject with bemusement or anger, or you're laughing at it, or you're furious at it, and it varies.
And it also...
There's this weird thing that happens with the crowd where you have to be completely connected to what you're talking about.
It's so funny you say that, because we were talking the other day amongst our friends.
We're saying a lot of this stems From a general distrust of everything.
And I think a lot of it, if we really kind of pinpoint, again, I'm simplifying things for sure, but the biggest problem I think we have right now is confirmation bias.
And then there's people willing to lie to you because they're in the same tribe as you and they want that confirmation bias to be cemented into your mind.
And it is the hardest thing because it's like they do these psychological studies like go outside and look for red cars and you're going to think that there's nothing but red cars on the street.
I mean you really you have this opportunity to do that and as technology has this access to it to be able to make something look very official and very real It's very difficult to have that as opposed to – and this is why,
again, someone like having this type of platform and you able to talk to anybody and everyone, I mean, it's really uncomfortable for a lot of people because – You're just talking to people.
And then it's like, well, why are you having this conversation with this person that I don't agree with?
And it's like, well, I had a conversation with a person that you do agree with yesterday, and you didn't say shit about that person.
Like, why are you not mad that we're spreading that person?
You know, it's kind of like this interesting thing when you have this platform that allows you to do that, and I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that, whereas something that I think that is very...
It's very needed and the people that are avoiding it, they're avoiding these uncomfortable moments where they might agree with someone that they have this ideological rift with.
Whether the person's on the right or the person's on the left, the person is this or that.
It's dumb.
It's a really dumb way to communicate.
I'm curious as to why people think and believe things and the way they communicate and why they've lived their life a certain way and why they have these very rock solid morals or ethics or why they don't.
I'm curious.
But that's why I did this in the first place.
I've always been a person who's interested in talking to people because I'm not exactly sure why I think the way I think sometimes.
I want to hear the way other people think.
And through that, you learn a lot about yourself.
And then you also pick up things that you admire about the way other people approach life and you apply those to your life and to the way that you interact with other people and life itself.
Yeah, you tend to gravitate towards people that agree with you.
Of course, it feels good to have a bunch of people in the same room patting you on the back and telling you how smart you are or how much we agree with each other.
But I think that there was a...
There's a real need to sit here and invite someone.
I was that kind of person.
I was the guy that when somebody came and knocked on my door to try to spread whatever gospel there was at that moment, whatever religion or whatever it was, I was, come on in.
Because I'm like, you say you have the truth.
I thought I was being told the truth in church every Sunday.
So, you got it.
Sit down and tell me what you got.
You know, I was like fascinated.
I mean, what drives you to come out into Houston 110 degrees on a bike to come spread this word?
The difference is that you're having that conversation one-on-one.
What people get upset about is that I'm having that conversation and millions of people are listening.
And so that conversation could potentially influence millions of people to think differently than the way they think.
The other thing is they think that other people are dumber than them.
It's an arrogance.
There's a real strong arrogance because they feel like if I'm talking to someone who believes that the earth is hollow and that aliens live inside of it and they're playing with our minds through fucking radio waves or whatever, The people that think that that's dangerous, the reason why they think it's dangerous is not because it's dangerous to them.
They think it's nonsense.
They think it's dangerous because they think some people are gullible and stupid, and those people are going to be easily influenced by that.
And I find that to be a very strange argument, and it's a very arrogant argument, because they're only looking at it in one way.
But the problem with even me saying this, though, is that there's real evidence that it is dangerous.
But that is a good example of a bunch of people that are kind of aimless and lost and fairly gullible and not very sophisticated in their ability to objectively analyze Q. Facts and data and just conversations and try to figure out what's real and what's not.
And also this real desire to be a part of this inside group of people that have some secret information and that this secret information will eventually change the world.
And there's a weird desire that people have to be a part of that and they get overwhelmed by it.
And it becomes their whole life.
And that's a big part of what that show was about.
A big part of that docu-series, which I really, really enjoyed, is psychology.
It's about the psychology of hidden truth, the psychology of people trying to right the wrongs and trying to think that they're a part of something that's bigger than them.
And most of those people, one of the things you'll notice in that documentary, For lack of a better term, and I'm not trying to be cruel, they're fucking losers.
Most of the people that got really locked into this shit are losers, meaning they're social outcasts, they're not successful in their chosen field, they're not particularly interesting or disciplined or excellent at anything.
I remember when I was a kid, the Red Sox lost the World Series, and what's the fucking dude's name who let the ball go through his legs?
Bill Buckner.
He let this ball go through his legs, and everybody freaked the fuck out.
It was a normal error, but it was in the World Series, and the Red Sox lost.
And people were just walking down the street.
They left their house.
They couldn't fucking take it.
They were just walking down the street, shaking their head.
They couldn't fucking believe it.
Couldn't fucking believe it.
It meant so much to them.
And this was at a time in my life where I had completely abandoned baseball.
I wasn't interested in it at all because I had really gotten into martial arts.
And so I used to be a baseball fan and in fact the way I found the Taekwondo school that I eventually joined was through a baseball game.
I went to a baseball game at Fenway Park and then waiting for the T, which is the transit system, waiting to get on the T, I wound up walking up the stairs and found this Taekwondo school.
So I had this weird connection.
So for me, it was like this changing of the way I looked at the world.
I'm looking at these people that are freaked out about a fucking guy who dropped a ball.
I think it points to also, again, how good we kind of have it, that these type of, like, we haven't, again, without saying, obviously people are going through some shit, but it's, when something like that can ruin your day, you're doing pretty good in life.
Or it might be a little bit of the opposite, meaning that's the only thing good in your life is that you have a team that's doing really well.
But I remember right in the very beginning of all this, I was talking to my grandmother.
She's 93. She's been through a war.
And she was using this word.
Luckily, I speak Chinese, but I speak like a child.
I can't do poetry.
I don't know any floofy language.
So I speak fluently, but not in that way.
And she was using this word over and over and over again.
And I assumed it meant COVID. She's kept using it.
Obviously, this context clues told me it was about COVID. And then she said...
So I asked my mother, I was like, what was this word that she keeps using?
And she texted it to me so I can Google it.
It was the plague.
She was using the word as the plague, like we're going through the plague.
And then I told her about it.
I said, I never heard this word before.
And this is her perspective, and it blew my mind, which she said...
She's like, I guess I should be very thankful that I raised my grandson in an age that he never had to learn the word for this.
And it really made me think about, imagine your kid's kids one day, not knowing what racism, what that word is.
In a history book, what's this word that keeps popping up?
Fifty years ago, we were really stupid.
We used to judge people by their pigment.
And they're like, oh my god, really?
And they had a whole word for it.
We used to call it this way.
We used to judge people on their race.
And the idea that these type of concepts didn't – that we had to create a word for it because whatever.
And it was fascinating for her to think about it that way because it's like – Yeah.
I never knew this word.
And so she's like, I should be thankful that you never had to learn it because we knew that word because we had to deal with a lot of shit like this overseas back in the day.
And then to think of, again, the non-scientific way, it must have felt like a plague.
This would have been the plague.
You know, it would have felt like that, just random, like, without understanding it, you know, even though, obviously, during the Spanish flu, people actually knew about it a little bit more.
But it's still, it's like perspective-wise, I think when people gravitate these things, like you said, cue and searching for all this stuff, we have a lot of time.
As opposed to when things were really, really tough and you were about to get eaten by wolves.
That you're down with Q and you understand Q and all these t-shirts that say, where we go one, we go all.
And they get real wacky with it because it becomes everything to them.
But you see that in so many aspects of our society.
You see it in people who are vaccinated versus unvaccinated.
You see it in people that support masks and lockdowns versus support freedom.
You see it in people that are left-wing versus right-wing, people that care about climate change versus people that think we have other problems that are bigger and we need to...
That sort of tribalism and also the adopting of ideas instead of thinking them through, this predetermined pattern of behavior and thought that so many people just sort of adopt.
Instead of thinking through themselves, form their own opinions, decide that these opinions are not you, they're just thoughts and ideas, and don't identify with them.
There's something I remember reading a study about that was fascinating about talking about the changing of your opinion is akin to actual physical damage.
There's actual pain associated with it.
For some folks.
No, for all of us, they're saying that there's, depending on how the trickle-down effect of changing something that you identify with can shatter your entire world.
Like, if you believed in, you know, like, I have to show it to you.
I have to find the article about it.
I'm butchering the science behind it, but it's along the lines of saying that if you really based off your identity off of a religious thought process, or let's say as a kid, it's like you believed in Santa Claus and then all of a sudden found out they were, you know, whatever.
I'm about to spoiler alert for the people who might be listening that don't know that yet.
But that concept is actual if they really kind of do a brainwave study.
It registers almost as pain.
Because all the stuff below it, or above it, however you want to say it, just shakes.
It gets completely disrupted.
And I think that a lot of people aren't willing to do that.
It's like, this is why when you associate with this one thing, or this one team, or this one person, or this person, it's like why they say never meet your heroes.
It's like, why is this so...
Crazy to think that this human is flawed.
But before you met them, that ruined your whole day.
And it's like, why is that weird?
Well, it's because I'd rather have just lived my entire life thinking this person is amazing instead of finding out that they're just like me in that way.
They're flawed.
They're a flawed human, you know?
And it's an interesting thing I think now with this kind of stuff is like when you join these tribes you join these kind of mentalities like this being a part of this community you know this is stuff it just really helps people who are who are kind of like you said is lost well I saw that a lot with gangs you know what growing up growing up it's like it's not these aren't criminals these people that didn't want to do that is they need family they need family We grew up in a thing.
It was very logical to me to see, luckily, even though I grew up single parent and everything like that, and my grandmother helped raise me, I didn't go that direction.
I could see because if I was going through some shit and this person over here said they would help me out and watch my back, that's how it starts.
And when you think about the erosion of the family and how many people don't have that feeling of someone being completely committed to them or a tribe that they completely belong to, and then something comes along like a gang that not only are they completely committed to you, but they weren't willing to kill.
And the people that are different, the people that are opposed, they are the literal enemy, which is something that's hardwired into us.
From the real tribal days, from the days of, you know, when you were literally a small group of 150 people worried about being invaded by other people.
And that was the reality of human existence for thousands and thousands of years.
And I think our brain is very binary in that way, too.
I think that's what we talk about also in this kind of organization, the stuff that we're doing now, Right.
Right.
Right.
I'm neither of neither, depending on the situation.
It's like you're talking about either you hunt and you're pro-killing every animal on earth or you have to be vegan or something like that.
It's this weird thing where we kind of polarize and we just naturally...
I think it's easier.
I think it's easier to just be...
You know, galvanized into this kind of thing and put somebody into this little box as opposed to having to sit there and go, all right, where is all the nuance in all of this conversation?
Well, if you work all day, though, like, say if you have some, like, labor-intensive job or some job that requires a lot of thinking and You know, you got eight hours a day plus commuting.
The amount of time that you have left to sort through all the ideas that you would need to vet in order to have like a real nuanced perspective on life.
It's very hard.
I've had conversations with people, regular folks, where they'll say something, and I'll say, well, why do you think that?
And they'll go, well, that's just true.
I go, well, tell me why you think it's true.
And then you see this uncomfortable moment where they don't have any access to information at all.
Like, hey, maybe it's good if we censor these people.
Like, well, censorship has never been good historically, and here's why.
And you have these conversations with them, and then you realize they never thought this through at all.
They never thought through where this all goes.
They just have decided that if you say a certain thing, a certain group of people that they're friendly with or familiar with, you go, yes, and that's what they want.
I think ultimately when you have this conversation with somebody and somebody says something, an opinion, and that you have this drive inside you to tell them that they're wrong, to convince them that they're right.
I mean, I think you and I are alike in that way where I'm curious as to why you believe this.
Not necessarily because I need you to believe what I believe, but I recognize that you don't believe what I believe.
There's a lot of stuff where I'm like, I'm not trying to call you out to say that you shouldn't be this way.
It's just that your reasoning behind it doesn't compute to me.
It just feels a little bit inconsistent.
It's like if somebody comes up to me and talks to me, it's like whether you want to do this healthy for you or that is healthy for you.
And it's like, yeah.
But...
You also eat...
It's like we're talking about somebody who says that or they're concerned about what they put in their bodies or whatever it is.
And you're like, if anybody has ever done...
I had a conversation the other day.
It was like, if you've ever done any recreational drugs, you really have no right to talk about that you're concerned about testing and whether or not something has...
I'm okay with you not wanting to do that.
But again, the consistency for me is to say that just believe it across the board or don't believe it across the board.
But it's to me, it's like that's the kind of conversation that I have with somebody is to say it's like even with, like you said, dogmatic things when I just naturally start poking holes and stuff because I'm just curious as to see what it takes to break an argument.
I just think there's a fascination for me to break down an argument.
Whether or not I still believe it at the end of the day doesn't mean anything.
I might still believe it and say that I still want to do that.
Like I said, inviting this guy in to speak to me about their religion.
And at the end of the day, I might believe in my religion and still say that, hey, that's fine.
But at the very least, I let you speak your piece, you know?
I think at the end of the day, the big problem is people that identify with their ideas.
And their ideas aren't just something that they're examining.
There's things that are obviously cleared.
Don't kill.
Don't rape.
Don't murder.
Don't steal.
Don't light people's houses on fire.
These real clear things, right?
And then as you pass those, you get into grayer areas.
This religion versus that religion.
Like, why do you believe this and why do you think that's wrong?
And it becomes your identity in a lot of ways.
And when your identity is wrapped up in ideas, and these aren't, again, not moral or ethical ideas that we could agree are beneficial to communities and beneficial to groups.
But instead, just ideas that you have decided to adopt and that these now are a thing that you will fight for.
You know, blue no matter who.
There's a lot of those dummies out there, right?
And they just have decided that the Democratic Party is right no matter what.
Or red.
Red till dead.
You know, there's those people too.
And that kind of nonsense thinking.
And you support these...
Ideas as if they're literally a part of who you are.
What I'm saying is it's so difficult because if you associated your entire identity with this idea, when somebody disrupts that idea, your entire identity is disrupted.
The thing about important stuff that people have to look up and try to figure out, like, why are we in Afghanistan?
Or why is this happening?
Or why is that important?
Or why is this law being passed?
Or what's, you know, what's the real motivation behind this drug being pushed?
Like, what the fuck is going on with that guy who's...
And there's so much of that in this world that it's – you could lose yourself.
Like if you didn't have a job and your entire day was sifting through the news and trying to find truthful narratives versus propaganda, you would lose your fucking mind.
So I think that maybe us now with access to all this information and all this content and all this data and all these people, all these voices of somebody that used to do 10 minutes of Twitter now doing four hours of Twitter and just sitting there and getting in these looped rabbit holes, I mean, it's got to be damaging.
Like we said, a lot of it is junk food.
I treat a lot of it like junk food.
I love a potato chip every once in a while, but if I eat it for eight hours a day, I think it would probably be pretty unhealthy.
And it's like, you know, I think that there's a monetization of...
Of human suffering, I think, is difficult.
You know, anytime you have that opportunity to where, because it's more interesting and it's more, you want eyeballs onto your content, so you just, it's a very simple algorithm.
It's just, we just need eyeballs, so whatever got people to watch it, then let's get more of that instead of stuff that's not interesting, you know, that might be just very boring data, you know, and so I think you just tend to lean towards that kind of stuff a little bit, and I think it's tough.
Yeah, I just...
That's the stuff that always fascinates me a little bit.
It's just because I think it takes us...
I don't think a lot of people have that kind of thing.
I think that a lot of people are just like, oh, I don't bother with that.
Oddly enough, where podcasts have sort of come in to fill that void because in podcasts you can have two intelligent people just sitting down talking about stuff in a way like, well, maybe that's not true.
Maybe this is true.
Let's find out.
Let's discuss this and let's figure out why people are saying this thing that is clearly untrue and saying it across multiple platforms.
What's the motivation behind this?
That's a thing that didn't exist before.
Because, first of all, in the past, we didn't think of the news as being this thing that was lying to us.
That's a real recent thing.
And I think a lot of that was exacerbated during the time that Trump was president.
The media was so upset that Trump had become the president and so upset that what they thought this con man was now running the entire government, that it's time to fight fire with fire.
And so they started attacking in the same way that they felt like he was attacking, the way he would call...
People by a nickname, you know, Lion Ted or, you know, fucking Lion Hillary or Crooked Hillary or, you know, have all these nicknames for people.
Call the news the fake news and like, God, we have to fight fire with fire.
We have to attack the same way he's attacking.
But in doing so, they've undermined their credibility to an almost irreparable way.
And I think it's because we all believe that people have an agenda.
Even with science, we are so used to people having an agenda that people think that there's an agenda with everything.
And there might be.
I mean, not to say that there isn't.
I think that that's the balance of it all, to sit there and say, Again, I'm even victim of what we're talking about right now, which is to say that while I believe that we probably lean this way, we're not to say that it's no such thing, that it's not possible that there's some puppet master out there that's really kind of affecting this this way or that the third.
But I'm just saying that at the end of the day, not everything has such a mastermindful type of thought process behind it.
Narratives that are set up in order to have people extract money from a system.
And that's what's really scary, is that you follow the money and it's right there.
And, you know, many people have talked for years about getting money out of politics and getting money out of...
To make it so that these people that make these huge decisions, That affect policy, affect the way we're allowed to live our lives, that there should be no money being exchanged in these decisions.
There should be no motivation.
No one should profit from these things.
No one who wants to be a politician should ever get exorbitantly wealthy from being a politician.
But yet that's the case over and over and over again.
And that's dirty.
That's dirty.
And that is what affects these people and that's what affects the way they behave and the way they communicate and the things they talk about and the things they won't talk about maybe sometimes is as important.
I think that whenever you talk about it to incentivize that, it's tough.
You know, I think that it's...
I see it a lot.
And so we see it in that kind of situation where we're like, if the product that or whatever you use is human suffering, then the logical said, in order for me to make more profit from it, I need more suffering.
There's more money in the treatment than it is in the cure.
I make a sandwich, if I can get the bread cheaper, I'll try to do that.
If I can make the bread, you know, I can get this more.
I can get it to more people.
These are all – there's some basic business 101. But then you start doing that with other things that are a little bit more needed for society, insurance or healthcare or, you know, prison system, all the stuff.
When you have money attached to it, the incentivization starts to become human experiences.
And so then you start with a situation where – Yeah, in order for us to, like we said, like Bo Burnham's bit, it'd be weird to sit, imagine sitting in the boardroom and talk about sales are plummeting, but that would be a good thing.
Well, you can't treat certain things the same way we treat businesses, and the problem is they do.
Like, if business is booming in the burger business, that's great, it means more people want burgers.
If business is booming in the homeless business, that means you are not doing your job.
You are allowing the homeless crisis to get worse and worse, and you're getting more and more money, and the budget gets bigger and bigger every year, and no one hits the brakes on it, because it's literally farming.
They're farming homeless people.
And that's the case with so many problems that we have in this society.
There's people whose job it is to take care of that situation.
And if that situation goes away, so does their job.
Even talking about even politics, like the idea that that becomes your job.
It's like, well, the intention is for you to stay in that job.
Nobody wants to lose their job.
It should be a...
Countdown timer.
Like I said, it really became prevalent to me in these conversations with these charities that I sat down and they're talking about was that we want my last check, we want the last check to bounce.
We want to be, we want to raise X number of dollars and say, we're good.
Well, it's spooky when you look at a charity and you find out how much money the actual charity gets, like how much goes to the actual problem and how much goes to administration costs and how much it goes to the salaries of people that are involved in the charity.
And you're like, what is this really?
Like, is this really charity or is this a job?
You have a job and your job is to do this.
And if you keep doing this job, you keep making money.
But the point of that, again, we're talking about is that the marketing that's required to do that is the idea of saying how much effort is put into fundraising and how much time it takes also.
So there's a lot of resources that are attached to that.
I don't know.
building that we're building the big art park out there at up by the airport Hope Outdoor Gallery the graffiti art park music venue and everything with the with art and we have this drive that says that art should be free that we want it to be that way but it's a And what our thought process was...
In order for art to be free, art has to beg for money all the time.
You know, the museums and everything like that is constantly charity-driven.
And we're like, well, why don't we tie in...
The reason I'm involved is from the F&B perspective is to say, if we get a whole bunch of people coming here to view art for free and then we sell them all a drink and a hot dog, we could fund that art product.
And then we could always make art free because people are going to naturally spend money on it anyways.
It's kind of almost like an amusement park kind of business model.
It's like, to me, it's a little bit of a disruptor in that way is because to sit there and say that these type of things, the arts, quote unquote, you know, it's like, well, how do we, to make it become a self-sustaining machine as opposed to constantly trying to fundraise?
Well, you have to throw a gala for 100 grand to raise 150 grand, and then you actually only made 100 grand, only made 50 grand.
And so it's like a weird thing to where it's like, well, why don't we kind of start this machine and then just be done with it and say, let this kind Also, it's like when someone says art should be free, like, okay, why?
Well, because I think that allowing art, it's like steel sharpens steel, right?
I think that there's a thing to say that street art, for instance, the kind of person that goes out there to practice or to learn or to be able to express themselves.
I think it's important for people to do that.
I don't think that everyone has their inner vandal to go out and And do that.
It's like because if you're going to be good at street art, you have to go and paint up some public walls somewhere.
And it was one of the things that we noticed while we built the big art park, the graffiti park that was happening downtown that was the original place.
people to go and just practice and allowed to just get to get some art in there and this is like sin there saying that i our belief was that the the leap from like let's say musicians or even a food vendor there's a lot of steps to get all the way from serving it out of a food truck to get really good art right to a michelin star right how does a street artist get to be excellent right Right.
And then on top of that, there's a huge jump between selling your stuff on the street corner to the MoMA, right?
And it's like somebody getting a million...
And it's all arbitrary, right?
I mean, Banksy did this thing a while back where he...
Whoever he was or his minion or whatever it was that sold pieces on the street corner for 20 bucks and then did it all on social media or whatever and then showed people that, hey, you just bought an original Banksy for 20 bucks.
It's probably worth a lot more now.
And people just liked it because they liked it and they were supporting this one random artist.
But then the exhibit was in there.
They do that all the time.
There's this guy that was playing violin in the subway outside the Philharmonic, and he was actually going to go in there and play at night for a concert.
And these people were tossing him 50 cents as opposed to paying $200 to get a seat at his own thing.
And so when I say that, I'm saying that we need to be able to get to the point where the education part, the skill side, to separate the wheat from the chaff and say that, hey, this is what I want to do for a living.
Let me teach you how to do it.
Our goal is to say if you're an artist and you want to make a living being an artist, it shouldn't be a risk in that way.
You might not be good at it, which is fine, but we need to teach somebody how to start a corporation so that they understand how to do their taxes properly.
We need to tell them how to trademark their stuff or copyright their things so they don't do this kind of stuff, or the education somebody's aware.
When somebody says they want to become an artist, they don't have to start off.
Well, I never cooked on the line at the restaurants.
I don't cook that way.
I don't like cooking that way.
One of the reasons why I never became a professional, professional chef in that way was because I don't want to cook the same thing over and over again.
I was always talking about, I cook like jazz.
Every meal is different from day to day because whatever I feel like.
Kind of amazing that you've managed to navigate that world, though, and get to the other side while still maintaining your love for the food itself and the way it's cooked.
That was the weirdest shit I've ever seen in my life, was I went to go see Brian Regan at the W, whatever it is, at Moody Theater.
And at the end, he did an encore, and people were just yelling out bits from his Comedy Central special.
And he was like, normally people come to his show to hear new stuff.
Apparently y'all aren't like that.
So he's just like, alright, name three bits and I'll just do them.
Word for word.
It was actually wonderful to see because I knew his old material.
And I was like, man, talk about rehearsed.
I mean, like I said, the Part that I admire about your job is that you're telling a story and it sounds like the first time you ever told it, but you guys have rehearsed the shit out of it.
That's a part of the problem is one of the things about nightclub performing and performing doing stand-up is you're guaranteed to be in a room full of drunks.
And people oftentimes are selfish, too, so they don't care if it fucks up the show as long as they can get you to react.
- That's true. - Like Dave and I did a show in Vegas a few weeks back and there was this fucking guy who kept fucking with him And then, you know, finally he had to yell out, man, will you just shut the fuck up?
And you could tell how upset he was and how upset the audience was.
It was just this dummy that needed attention.
And there's a lot of people out there that think that that's okay.
They think that they should be able to just get attention.
It became things where people would just tell joke jokes.
And then along the lines, Lenny Bruce came along, and Lenny Bruce was heavily influenced by drugs.
And his love of drugs, I think, also led to an erosion of the sensibilities of the common culture.
Like, he felt like they were foolish, and he would examine them and discuss them, and then talk about All these sort of taboo subjects and talk about all these things that we just took for granted that are really kind of ridiculous.
And that was...
Lenny Bruce is the real godfather of modern stand-up.
And then there was Mort Sahl, who existed in kind of the same era.
He was more politically oriented.
And there was quite a few other people that came around that were influenced by him.
And then, you know, George Carlin, of course.
And Pryor.
Pryor was the first guy to take that sort of brutal honesty and turn it on himself and make it very personal and very relatable and also just masterfully funny.
He was so much funnier than anybody that had ever come along before him.
So much funnier than that.
Even though comedy is very connected to the time.
If you try to watch some comedy movies from the 80s, they look so dated and stupid.
But if you can watch a Richard Pryor special from 1980, it's still damn good.
Damn good.
Yeah, because he was so good that it transcended.
But it still doesn't explain to people, it doesn't really resonate with people how good he was back then.
Because the time's so different.
The era is so different that if you could somehow or another transport yourself back to 1983 and watch Pryor, then you would understand.
But you would have to exist in the time period to be able to really appreciate how groundbreaking he was.
I think that that's why I think we talk about it is one of the things that Dave does so well.
You do.
The comedians that I enjoy watching the most have a way of really kind of...
Bridging these gaps a little bit.
It's almost like tricking us, the listener, through comedy of saying something that I agree with and then at the very last second going, ha!
We actually agree with the person that you didn't agree with.
And you're like, crap.
Or you're saying something that I'm about to be offended by and then turning it at the end and go, oh, I said that already.
Like, I believe that actually.
And I really enjoyed that.
I really enjoyed that aspect of being – there's a masterful, there's a maestro level of conducting of a crowd that I really, really love.
And that's what you're talking about.
I think there's something about how exciting it is to see a room full of people enjoying your food.
I just think that it's like – You know, my brief stint when I was in high school theater.
And when you got a line, when you got the line that you're like, this is a line that everybody goes on to laugh at, and knowing it, it's just like set up, knock it out, you know, is this feeling.
And I remember I was at a Wu-Tang concert in London.
And it's just like, to play a crowd like an instrument, to be able to sit there and go, everyone throw your hands up, boom.
Everyone throw your W's up, boom.
Thousands of people doing whatever you want.
How could you not feel like, this side jump, this side sit down, this side do this.
That's the one thing that's really amazing about this time is there's so much art.
There's so much stuff that people have created that you have access to that can change your perceptions of life and that can enhance your perceptions of life and enhance the way you understand how human beings think and express themselves.
Just take for a second to just sit there and say, what would you say to this person if your ultimate goal was to be kind first?
How would you talk to this person if you had any concern about whether or not this person Would get there, would get, you would feel like pain from what you're saying.