Guy Fieri traces his Knuckle Sandwich brand from a tattoo joke to a $6B+ empire, rejecting culinary school norms and embracing diner culture’s raw passion. His Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives show highlights vegan restaurants’ quality while debunking moral superiority claims, shifting to AI’s risks—fake Rogan episodes, deepfakes—and the lack of regulation. Fieri’s philanthropy, like a $1.7M Taylor Sheridan fundraiser for first responders, clashes with "defund the police" movements, exposing systemic disrespect. Raised by his father’s critical-thinking obsession, he now champions imagination and hard work over fame, contrasting with OnlyFans’ exploitation and societal decay. Both agree: evil thrives in unchecked systems, but positivity—like psychic mediums or autistic savants—reveals untapped human potential. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, especially all the influence you've had and things you've done.
And I know the funny side of you.
I know the UFC side of you.
But watching the podcast and seeing all the characters, and I was just watching the Bill Murray interview the other day, and I just look at it and I go, man, to hear those stories talking about Hunter and just all that and all the nostalgia.
I mean, it's just, it's pretty, you've got to have your mind blown by now.
I give such appreciation and accolades to everybody that did it before me.
There were so many people that helped pave the way in one style or another.
And some in TV, some literary, some...
You know, just living the, you know, keeping the energy of the industry alive.
Because if you're not from the industry, you don't quite exactly get what it is.
But it's a pretty, it's like understanding UFC.
You know, the bigger fan you become of something, the more you start looking at it and just going, it is so much more than what you're watching in the ring for the, you know, next 20 minutes.
It's really deep and there's so much more and there's so much, it's not just lifestyle, it's attitude, it's energy, it's...
This is about the most whacked story in the world.
So, alright, so, never graduated high school.
Dropped out of high school when I was 16. Went to France.
I was an exchange student.
I'm going to give you a little bit more of the backstory than you probably want, but I'll kind of give you the quick version.
So when I came back from France, I was supposed to go to my senior year in high school, and I wasn't really super interested in going back to high school.
I just lived in France in a boarding house and went to high school, and I didn't even speak French.
But my parents were really open-minded, and I'd save my money, and they said, if you can pass a year of French at the junior college at 16, and you can pass the class, and you can figure it out, I guess.
So I went and lived in a boarding house and went to high school.
Came back my senior year, I just was not interested in going back to high school.
So I went to junior college, finished junior college, went to UNLV, got my degree, graduated a little bit early and went and ran restaurants for other people.
And then, and I was 26, moved back to the wine country up to Northern California where I'm from, opened my first restaurant.
Had a bunch of restaurants with a buddy.
Things were great.
Did exactly what I wanted to do.
Wanted to be, you know, have a great wife.
Wanted to be a great dad.
Wanted to have my own restaurant.
That's all I wanted.
Not that I was short-sighted and stuff, like being a big community person, wanted to do a lot of, you know, community service and so forth.
My parents were that way.
So that was it, man.
I had like three restaurants, owned a couple hot rods, bought my own house.
I was living it, you know.
And a bunch of friends came up to me, actually a kid across the street came to me and said, you watch Food Network?
I said, no.
He said, we have a show on there called the Food Network Star.
You should go on that show.
I hadn't even seen Food Network.
I saw Rachel Ray one time.
I was at a bar.
I saw Rachel Ray on screen, and I'm like, that girl's got energy.
I mean, listen to her.
And she could talk food.
She doesn't know her shit.
So that was whatever.
About six, eight months later, my wife's driving home from the city.
She says, hey, I was just listening to the radio station.
They had that Food Network star show going on.
She goes, you'd be great in that.
I go, how do you know?
You haven't seen the show.
She goes, no, they're just talking about it, like, you know, the culinary challenges and all the things.
Listen, Jamie, welcome to Sonoma County, California, home of true wine country cuisine.
Today I'm going to prepare a dish for you, not in fusion, but in confusion.
I'm going to do a gorgonzola tofu sausage terrine that we served over a mildly poached ostrich egg.
Now, since we're in the wine country, I'll be serving that on grape nuts and done with a delicious pickled herring mousse right on top.
Oh, I know, delicious.
It sends shivers up my spine.
No, seriously, folks.
Real food for real people.
That's the idea.
See, it's all getting messed up.
People are trying to take everything off the shelf and jam it onto a plate, and that's not what it has to be.
I learned how to cook out of survival.
My parents are going through this macrobiotic cooking in the late 70s and I had enough bulger and steamed fish to kill a kid.
So the idea in our family was whoever made the dinner got to decide what it was going to be.
And being of Italian descent, pasta was always one of the keys.
I went and studied in France and then came back and got my degree at University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Restaurant Administration.
I've been a district manager in Los Angeles and moved up here to Northern California to open up three different concept restaurants.
What I'd like to talk to you about and what I think I could do as a Food Network host is teach people about real food, real people.
Get it to the basics.
Great product.
Great equipment, great ideas.
See, anybody can read a cookbook.
Anybody can come up with a simple idea.
But the idea is bringing it to the table.
I take people's imaginations and put them on the plate.
Let me show you one of my favorites.
I was on my way back from Houston where I was down there learning about Southern Style Barbecue.
And I came up with this idea.
I've got to take Southern Style Barbecue and mix it into Japanese cooking.
See, in Japanese, sushi does not mean raw fish.
And that's what people think it does.
It means seasoned rice.
So I take a little bit of seasoned rice.
A little bit of smoked pork butt, and we put this together here in a dish with a little of our American favorite, french fries, and mix this together with a little bit of the California favorite, some avocado.
And I came up with this idea, and as I was doing this, a buddy came around the corner and he says, Guido, what are you doing?
He says, you can't put that into rice.
You can't make sushi out of barbecue.
What are you doing, you jackass?
And that's what this dish is called.
It's actually called the jackass roll.
So we mix it up, we serve it over.
The idea about cooking is not just about great food.
It's about putting all the pieces.
Do you have a sharp knife?
Do you understand sanitation?
Do you know where to get it from?
And do you know how to tie all the components together?
You see, my idea about it is, is there's so much more to teach.
As a restaurateur, people ask me all the time, how do you do it?
I can take the restaurant and bring it to the home, and I think that would be something that would be sellable.
And that was way before Bluetooth stuff was really going on.
There was a two-stroke weed eater mower with a blender on it.
And that was the coolest one.
I made margaritas in that.
But the one they gave me that sucked the worst, or the one that I wasn't excited, was they gave me a ball, like a hamster ball.
Remember the hamster ball as you put the hamster and run around the house?
But you'd pour cream and vanilla and sugar and all this in a ball and then throw ice cubes in it and then you would roll the ball around, kick it around, and it would roll and it would make ice cream.
It went through a series of people, like executive, executive from the production company, the owner of the production company, yelling at me, telling me he wasted time and his money.
I said, hey, nobody told me that if this got picked up, I had to go do the show.
I thought it was a discovery for you, a discovery for me.
I don't know shit from Steak Sauce about how this all works, which I quickly turned that.
I was not going to be inside of the TV business and not be really aware of what goes on.
Finally, the president of the network called me and she said, you're burning a huge opportunity.
Brooke Johnson, you're burning a huge opportunity.
I said, Brooke, it's all about, to me, about authenticity.
I said, I don't need the paycheck and I don't need, I said, I'm happy with my life.
I love what I do.
I like my cooking show called Guy's Big Bite.
You know, I cook food the way I want.
Call it what I want to call it.
Make it the way I want to make it.
And I said, I just don't, me and gadgets for cooking is just not a thing.
She goes, well, you might not ever get a shot like this again.
I said, I really appreciate the opportunity, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I just don't want to do it.
And she said, okay.
And that was it.
But fortunately, six months later, they called me back and said, we're going to give you one more shot.
You're going to be a food critic.
I said, nope, thank you.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Why not?
I said, I'm not a food critic.
I'm a cook.
The last thing I'm going to do is go in and tell people they're doing it right or wrong.
That's like someone going and telling somebody they don't like their art's wrong.
Bullshit.
That's not my style.
So they said, well, okay, it's not that.
It's not that.
You go around.
This was the key word.
You go around to mom and pop joints and you just eat the food and talk to the people.
My God, I can do.
That's my style.
I said, what's it called?
Diners, drivers, divins, and dines.
I said, what?
They couldn't get the name right.
No one ever gets diners, drivers, and dines right.
That's why we call it triple D all the time.
I said, I could do that.
I could do that.
That sounds like dives.
I love dives.
I don't know a lot about diners because we don't have many of them on the West Coast.
And drive-ins I love.
That was always special to me to go to the A&W drive-in when I was a kid.
We didn't eat fast food when I was a kid.
So when you went there, that was like big, big deal.
Yeah, it seems like it's hard to find because once they started making personalities out of chefs, Then you have to find authentic personalities who are good on TV that are actually cooks.
So it's kind of a little bit of a dilemma because chefs aren't necessarily the kind of people that you want to have in front of the camera for the most part.
I think that everybody, when you get people comfortable as, you know, you get people comfortable, you get them talking about themselves, you get them in a zone where they...
Feel good and they relax.
It's very – it's what you do here.
I mean I watch.
It's – people have a gift of storytelling or have history and what can people talk best about themselves or their history or their passion and that's what I did with Triple D is I just went in.
I remember the first one we ever shot.
I'm standing there talking to the guy about the thing, and I'm pouring coffee behind my back.
People are bitching at the counter because we're right in the middle of an active service in the diner.
I'm pouring coffee, and pancake's burning, and I flip the guy's pancake.
And I'm like, so how long have you been making the, you know, yeah, hang on a second.
He needs an order back, you know.
And I asked all my questions I was supposed to ask.
And the producer at the end goes, cut, cut, cut, cut.
I said, come here.
I said, what the hell was that?
I said, slow your roll, bro.
I said, I asked every question you asked me to ask.
I said, I didn't stand there and do it like PM Magazine.
You know, I was in the mix with the dude, but I asked all the goddamn questions.
And he's like, can you do that again?
I said, I just stand on my head.
This is what we do in the restaurant business.
I said, we work and we talk and we joke and we laugh and we bust balls and we do, you know, that's what we do.
He throws his clipboard on the ground.
We've got a hit.
And then we went around the country for the next three weeks and shot more locations and put that together into the pitch.
So it's kind of like saying, I didn't mean to throw the vegan thing on it because really what it is, it's about great restaurants.
With really great people that own it or people that have a good story and then people that want to talk about what the food, they talk about what they do.
And she had a coffee shop, started with a coffee shop and then was doing a little bit of food on the side and then just continued to grow and make it bigger and bigger.
It's so funny.
I drive up and they got a big neon that says caffeine dealer.
And I'm like, that's my kind of energy.
That's my kind of smartass.
You've got to have fun with yourself.
You've got to laugh about this shit.
And just great character.
I'm actually probably getting my ass kicked from the network right now going through telling about this ahead of time.
But no, there's great...
I haven't been to Austin a few years shooting Triple D, but I'll come back to a city and new places have popped up.
No, that's a big one when people start doing jujitsu and they only want to...
Tell everybody about jujitsu.
The vegan thing, though, is like I really do get it from their perspective, like as an ethical perspective.
It's just one of those things where if there's a thing that you're trying to do, where you're trying to be kind, you're going to get a certain percentage of people that start doing that that get annoying.
When people just start looking at it and go, okay, we're done.
We've had enough of it.
It's run its course.
It's been poisonous enough.
I mean, there's positive things to it.
Don't get me wrong.
I think there's some really good information that you can get from it.
You know, I always say to these young chefs that are on my shows, like, oh, somebody wrote about me.
And I'm like, A, quit reading about yourself.
B, look at the source.
Now, if I come up to you and I tell you that your food sucks, or I tell you that you're doing something that's wrong, you know, we're friends.
You can maybe take my opinion with some credit.
But the jerk-off that's writing about you in his mom's basement eating Cheetos in his underwear, you know, clucking away, telling you how much you suck.
Once you know that they're full of shit, and once you know that they lie, take away their power.
The way you take away their power is just not pay attention to them.
And they do it to themselves.
I mean, in general, mainstream media has kind of, over the last...
You know, eight, nine years has exposed themselves as being wholly corrupt, very corrupt and full of lies and propaganda and ignoring positive aspects of people because they don't fit with your political agenda.
It's just – and it has a negative effect downstream of the entire civilization because it's just like everybody's at everybody's throats and they're being – Fed all this negativity.
First through mainstream media, and then it's all accentuated by Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.
I think if I had a reinforced arrow, so like, you know, there's companies that may look super durable, like much heavier grain arrows, and maybe an iron will broadhead, but like a single bevel, two blade.
I had a three-blade, too much of a big cutting surface.
You could essentially, right now, just from the podcast that you and I have had so far, us talking, you could have us say anything forever.
They could do podcasts where you and I discuss fucking computer chips, the construction of them, Conversations about nuanced details of the technology that we don't understand.
It could be anything, a big foreign policy.
You could talk about anything, and it would all be AI-generated and no one would be able to tell.
There's a whole podcast out there of me talking to Steve Jobs.
I think it's even deeper and more convoluted, more screwed up than we know.
But it's going to become something we're going to have to face because they're just so far ahead of our legislation that's even interested in trying to control it.
It is, but it's also like what is reality going to be?
Because what you're seeing right now is just a visual representation of what AI can do.
But what about once it starts being able to recreate experiences?
Because that's coming.
I mean, whether it's 20 years or 50 years, there's going to come a time, if you stay alive long enough, where you're not going to have to experience things.
You're going to be able to sit down and...
You know, just like the Matrix, it's just going to plug you in and you're going to experience something.
Well, when you think about where this is all headed, there's only a few different directions that one could go to, and simulated reality is a big one.
I think that's inevitable.
Because I think you're going to get more sedentary people, more people that are very uncomfortable with their own lives and want to live a different life, and then you're going to be able to have experiences.
Just like when kids play Call of Duty all day long.
Like, what are they doing?
They're playing war with zero consequences, where they're able to kill people with zero consequences, get killed, respawn.
And they're doing it all day long just for the experience.
Well, what happens when that experience is far more vivid?
You're feeling things.
You feel gravity.
Your feet feel the concrete underneath you and the gravel you're stepping on.
They're going to be able to recreate all that stuff.
Whether they do it with an implant or whether they do it with a helmet that you wear that sort of interacts with your brain, sends signals into your visual cortex and recreates experiences.
It's a weird time for change because we're like riding this technological wave and we don't know when it's going to break and where it's going to break.
What I'm getting at is I think that the change is going to be way more radical than just going from a horse to a Model T. I think it's going to be...
There's a lot of people that believe we're already in a simulation.
And not a lot of people like kooks and people with schizophrenia, but like actual real scientists, including Elon, he said that the odds of us not being in a simulation are in the billions.
Because the idea is that...
If technology increases, one day there will be a simulation that will be so good you will not be able to distinguish whether or not it's real.
And so then the question is when will you know whether that's taken place and has that already taken place?
A concept of a human-computer collaboration, and this is 1960, where computers would augment human capabilities in decision-making and complex tasks.
This vision involved computers facilitating both the solution of formulated problems and the formulation of problems themselves, essentially creating a partnership where humans and computers could work together more efficiently.
I mean, it's like there's so many people that are so susceptible to it.
And it's just free will.
I mean, it's just it's out there and people don't even know how to harness it or even understand what they're getting duped into or whatever the case may be.
It's like the things that people are putting on the Internet and it lives in perpetuity.
I think the big thing in food, like one of my positions on it, and I always tell people, you know, like, oh, you're the guy that does that show about deep fried cheeseburgers and pizza.
I'm like, no, no, you don't watch the show enough if that's what you think, because I'm super opinionated about, not opinionated, but I have a real responsibility, I think, to show the profile of food in the world or, you know, in the United States.
We've got to get our shit straight about what we're eating.
We're just, we can't eat this processed food.
I mean, processed food is, you're not eating it.
I mean, we got to eat the basics and eat great food and eat great food made correctly.
But something that was made a long time ago, don't get me wrong, there's a place for everything.
There's a place for fast food.
There's a place for, you know, things that are pre-made and so forth.
But it can't be all of one thing.
But people need to eat better.
And, you know, you being a hunter and myself, I talk to people all about it all the time.
You know, this is a reality that if you eat things that are modified, I'm not saying genetically modified doesn't have a place, but it can't be all the same stuff.
And if we don't watch it, we're going to get ourselves in some deep shit.
And we're already in deep shit.
Cancer's, you know, where's the heart attack?
Where's the stuff that was plaguing us for so many generations?
And now this cancer thing, I lost my sister to cancer, I lost my dad to cancer.
I run into more people on a daily basis that are, you know, stricken with cancer.
And I think food has a, you know, The type of food and what's put on the food.
So, I found people living within one mile of a golf course have 126% higher risk of developing...
What happened?
126% higher risk of developing Parkinson's disease compared to living more than six miles away, said co-author Dr. Ray Dorsey, a neurologist and the director of the Center for the Brain and the Environment at Atria Health and Research Institute in New York.
This isn't the first study that links Parkinson's disease with pesticides.
This just adds additional evidence that this isn't just happening among farmers.
This is happening to people living in suburban areas that have an increased risk of I met a guy once that...
He had bone cancer, and he had one of his bones in his legs replaced with a rod.
And he said that there's an enormous percentage of people in his neighborhood that had bone cancer and all kinds of different cancers, and it was all linked to this golf course.
The runoff from the golf course had gotten into the water table and the water supply of all these people.
Yeah, it's dangerous, and that shit's not even legal in a lot of countries.
That's what's crazy.
That's glyphosate.
I think they're linking this golf course thing to glyphosate as well, aren't they?
The lunch that we had at school was because I lived in this boarding house.
I rented a room from this family and they were terrible cooks.
I didn't think you'd go to France.
Everybody cooked good.
But anyhow, I went to high school.
I looked forward to lunch at school.
It was the best school lunch in the world.
You'd sit at a table like this.
There were eight kids and they would come by with a cart and they'd put down a hotel pan full of, you know, whatever vegetable, whatever starch, whatever meat.
We'd sit there and we had all the French bread we could eat.
And it was just like, I looked forward to it so much.
It was such great food.
I just never got it.
Well, and then I got older and started cooking, and I kind of went, oh, really?
So the funny thing was I went back to France 25, 30 years later, took my oldest son, Hunter, with me.
We did a whole tour through Europe when he graduated high school.
I took him to seven countries and 14 cities in 30 days.
And we did this whole tour of where food came from.
But I took him back to Chantilly, and I went to the grocery store.
Because my best friend from school still lived there.
And I walked into the grocery store.
And what had been a grocery store full of huge aisles of fresh produce and breads and everything you could imagine was now just freezer, freezer, freezer, freezer, freezer, freezer.
Yeah, I think fresh food is really the only thing that people are supposed to be actually eating all the time.
Real food.
I mean, the more that you can get to a farmer's market, the more that you can have relationships with ranchers and people that actually provide you food, the healthier you're going to be.
And the further you get away from the source, the more you're going to have preservatives, the more you're going to have processed food.
Stay away from the inside of the supermarket.
All that stuff on the inside.
I mean, there's condiments and stuff, but most of it's bullshit.
The outside.
Vegetables, meats, eggs, all that stuff that's on the outside, all that refrigerated area on the outside, that's all you're supposed to be actually eating.
All that stuff that's in the middle is just fucking your life up for the most part.
We've been bamboozled, you know, and corporations, you know, the same corporations that used to, well, still do, own tobacco companies, bought out all these big processed food corporations.
I mean, this is something that RFK Jr. has talked in depth about.
And then they started using the same tactics to get people hooked on these processed foods.
And these processed foods are essentially designed to make them incredibly addictive.
And they're cheap.
And people just consume them en masse.
And it becomes a large percentage of the calories you take in.
It's going to take a long time for people to adjust and switch away from that.
But it goes hand in hand because when you start thinking about this cancer thing and how devastating it is, I'm like, we can't really solve this?
And then you listen to some other sides that will say, big business.
You don't make money securing people.
It's one and done.
It's over.
I don't know.
It weirds me out.
We have, you know, you've got such a massive platform and I talk, you heard my little pitch there at the beginning of Food Network, real food for real people.
I'm not saying these restaurants I shoot on Triple D, you should go eat every single day because not every one of them is, you know, always the healthiest situation.
I think you need to have a good balance between things.
You'd plug the freezer into the thermostat and then the thermostat into the wall and then you'd put a little temperature in there and it would regulate itself so it didn't turn into a block of ice.
But every time I got in, I had to unplug it because they're not UL-rated for humans to be in them.
The thing about it is, like, I don't know what the benefit is other than it sucking more.
I think your body temperature stays the same because it's like, just by, I guess...
You don't feel as bad because your body, like in a regular cold plunge because your body develops that thermal barrier, but you're still cold as shit.
And you get all the benefits.
I don't think you have to suffer through that raging river thing.
But if you want the mental benefits, the benefits of overcoming adversity and the ability to just force yourself to do something that's intolerable, then I would recommend doing that.
If you're one of those people that really enjoys torturing themselves.
So Federal Hill in Rhode Island is a real famous Italian.
It shows up there a couple times, but it's not too far from where my wife's family lived.
I just remember going up there and going to the delis and getting those cherry pepper stuff with prosciutto and provolone and just, you know, I'll take six of them and then I'll take 18 to go.
I would always, you know, bring them all back to California.
But the question I have about that, that's what people ask me all the time.
When I first started Triple D, you could only get true Tex-Mex or great Mexican food really in this Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California, down in this pocket.
But I will say that now I'm starting to find...
Because typically it's the people migrating to these different areas.
I went to a Mexican joint on Triple D in Minneapolis.
And it's a Mexican market.
It's the whole thing.
And it was better than 85% of the joints that I've tried in these regions I was just talking about.
So I'm starting to find this...
Better cross-pollination of foods in different regions.
So I think we had to buy the guy's, like, you know, we had to buy him something or pay the tip or whatever for the guy to move his boot, and we got the ticket.
It was a tumultuous experience.
I go with people now, and I'm like...
Take the ticket.
Put it in your wallet right now.
I'll pay the meal, but just don't lose the ticket.
That's my, you know, being a dad was my biggest job, my biggest responsibility.
Husband, restaurateur, chef, all that.
But my end game is my philanthropy.
Philanthropy to me, I mean, I have so much opportunity and there's so many good things coming my way.
I try to divert as much of that towards doing it.
So my philanthropy is about first responders.
First responders, active military and veterans.
But now that I have this program going where we can do things to raise money, and it's not just raise money, it's raise the money and then do things with it.
Like when the fires happened in LA, we went down with our team, we have a big rescue trailer that's 50 feet long.
We can feed about 5,000 a day out of it.
And I have a bunch of chef buddies, and so they all come and help, and we just pump out food for first responders.
But I was doing, we had the fires in Maui.
And devastation.
And I know the fire feeling because I was up there in Northern California in Sonoma County when we had our bad fires.
And so we raised money.
So I got 40 chefs together.
We were all in town doing, I do a show called Tournament of Champions.
They were in town for the tournament.
And we put on a dinner for 150 people.
So I called Taylor and said, hey, I'm doing this event.
You want to come up?
And he says, only if I get to cook.
You know, we're going to cook together.
So we brought up all these, you know, four sixes, these tomahawk chops the size of, you know, a manhole cover.
And we cooked.
And so we sat there and we raised money and we did all these different things like, you know, go to Four Sixes Ranch.
You can go be here.
You can go, you know, have a culinary experience with Guy, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And in one night, we raised $1.7 million with 150 people in the room.
He told me, he says, listen, I know what you're doing up there in Northern California.
You've done your fundraiser there a bunch of years.
He says, come down and do it in my ranch.
He says, I will bring you the people with the money that believe in what you're doing with these first responders.
Because when we don't have disasters, we just go do positive energy thank yous to different municipalities.
We just did one in Florida, South Florida.
We just bring the trailer in, bring a bunch of chefs in.
Call up the local sheriff.
Call up the troopers.
Call up everybody.
You know, bring your families if you want.
It's free lunch.
Time for you to celebrate and be recognized.
You know, we got people walking around the streets that don't understand why our country's free.
They don't have any idea what it takes to be a free country.
And they don't understand the sacrifice, not just the sacrifices that the actual individual makes.
But the sacrifice the family makes.
I'm not even talking about the loss of somebody.
We're talking about just being deployed for seven months and not seeing dad for seven months or seeing your husband or your wife or whatever.
And I remember I was on the USS Enterprise and I was doing a philanthropy event years ago.
I was cooking for the sailors and a bunch of Marines on there.
It was like 5,200 people.
And I'm on the line serving this young...
I'm a sailor, and she came through, and we were kind of talking for a second.
She says, "I have four kids." I said, "How?" She wasn't very old.
I said, "How many?" She goes, "Well, I have an eight-month-old baby." "Babies on the ship?" She goes, "No babies, no." I said, "How could you be away from your child at this age?" And she's like, "No, I'm deployed." I'm like, "What a commitment." You know, what a commitment to do.
And the kids without.
So I think, I mean, my mantra is we talk about people pushing things on other people about their beliefs or their opinions or their attitudes.
And I said, you know, I kind of divert from all of it.
And, you know, if you don't want to like something, don't like it.
That's your thing.
But I am hell bent on.
What goes on in this country about how we recognize our veterans and our first responders and our active military.
Also didn't know that he served our country in the military.
Please, when you see somebody in uniform, if you see somebody with a Vietnam vet hat, you see somebody that's in, you know, take a moment, just say thank you.
But the reality of this, we have a lot of people that were focusing on the victims and giving them, which they need.
But these guys were doing...
These men and women weren't going to bed.
They were doing 72-hour shifts, sleeping in the back of their patrol car.
They drove their patrol car up from Riverside and they're up in Northern California now.
And so that's what I changed.
I pivoted my whole foundation was when the disasters go down, we're going to get there and we're going to focus on the first responders.
We were down in L.A. for 10 days.
We fed 25,000 meals.
Now, it's not going to feed everybody, and it's not going to take care of everything, but there is a point of them being recognized or knowing that we recognize them.
And I had so many chefs in L.A. that showed up and jumped on the trailer and were cooking food, and we were almost cooking 24 hours.
It was just rolling over, and people were so thankful.
Okay, maybe you don't have the money, donate the time.
Maybe you don't have the time, do the positive reinforcement on social media.
You know, if you don't have the time, you don't have social media, you don't have the money, you don't have time, just pat somebody on the back and say thanks.
Well, just as a society, we need to recognize the importance of these people and appreciate them for what they do.
And I don't think that that's been accentuated.
That's not been...
People haven't focused on that.
And that's a top-down thing that comes from the president, that comes from the cabinet, that comes from the way the country perceives these people and the way they award these people and, you know, the way that our...
Media treats them.
You know, the media had a field day after George Floyd with this defund the police stuff.
It's just that kind of devastation that does for morale and for recruiting and, you know, just...
The overall feeling that these people have, like, why am I doing this job where not only am I not being thanked for it, but I am being thought of as the enemy?
And it talks really about just human nature, about how you treat people and treat people the way you want to be treated and think before you act and think before you speak or before you light somebody up on a text.
And I was going through this and I said, you know, this is like a course that should be taught at freshman high school.
We should teach civility and we should teach respect and responsibility.
We should take – back your mouth up.
Don't go popping off.
And do these things the way we grew up.
I mean I'm not saying that violence is the answer but you definitely didn't have people running their mouth like they do now because there was hell to pay at 3 o 'clock.
That kind of stuff.
So I think that we need to get involved in teaching our young America that … They have a voice.
They have an opinion.
They're very worthwhile.
And let's just do it the right way.
But I think that Dale Carnegie Institute, that How to Win Funds, I didn't know how many things.
They do it worldwide.
And I just think, I was just telling my sons about it.
I said, you can all expect that you're going to be going to one of these programs or doing one of these courses.
And I think that, like, I didn't, until you're in that club, the club sucks, but when you meet somebody that is in the fight, the fight for their life, give them a hug, give them a smile, give them encouragement, and if they have battled and they have won, Recognize them as a warrior, as a survivor, especially breast cancer and all these horrible cancers that people are stricken with.
We need to have more apathy, more understanding.
And I'll tell you, one of the greatest groups of people in the whole world, hospice.
I don't know how much you know about them and what it is, but if you don't understand what hospice does, they're earth angels.
There are people that come in when you're battling this.
You're watching a loved one die.
And they come in and they're the people that help you with the meds and help you with the caregiving and help you.
And you don't even know them.
And they come into your life and they leave your life once the cancer is.
But they stay.
You'll meet them on the street again or you'll see something.
But hospice is one of the greatest programs we have in this country.
Remember when you were a kid, though, getting the VHS, you'd go, you know, ours would have to go get it at the liquor store, little town, you know, or you'd go all the way across the bridge and go get it and you'd put your, you know.
name down for the reservation to get it and you'll get faces of death and your friends would all come over and yeah yeah pizza night you'd have to hide those things from your parents Yeah, exactly.
But if you thought about it, like if you were really cynical and you thought about it through an evil mind, if you wanted to abuse kids, what would you do?
It's sick, but It's like if you were a sick person, that's what you would do.
If you wanted to be around kids, you would pretend that you're really interested in helping kids.
Yeah, I was in the Boy Scouts, too.
Nothing happened to me.
I was in a good troop.
But I was in the Boy Scouts with a bunch of crazy inner-city kids.
I was living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which is kind of sketchy outside of Boston.
And they brought us to New Hampshire.
We were all in the woods, and they were fucking...
Tying kids up to their cots and dragging them out in the woods in the middle of the night and leaving them there like other kids were doing that and putting toothpaste on all your clothes because you couldn't wash it off.
They were just psycho kids.
And they gave us 22s.
That was the other part of the problem.
I remember I was hanging out with my friends and I heard...
I was like, what is that?
And someone goes, that's a ricochet.
I was like, fuck this.
So the entire time I was in camp, all I did was go fishing every day.
They had all these activities.
I'm like, you guys can...
Kiss my ass.
I'd grab a fishing rod and go down to the lake.
I'm like, I'm just going to go fishing the entire two weeks I'm here.
Yeah, well, not only that, how about the fact that this guy was running this for decades?
He was doing this for decades.
Who knows how many fucking people, and everybody was scared to talk about it because he'd have them killed.
Yeah, it's really wild, man.
Evil is a real thing, you know?
Nobody wants to believe, because if you believe in the devil, right, if you believe in Satan, you believe in something that's silly.
Like, most people believe, a lot of people believe in God.
If you ask people, do you believe in God?
Yeah, well, I'm not religious, but I believe in God.
Okay, well, do you believe in the devil?
Most people say no.
But do you believe in evil acts?
Well, yeah, well, people certainly do evil things.
Well, where do you think that comes from?
If evil is real, what is it about us that makes us want to deny the possibility that there's some nefarious force that is in human beings, that influences human beings?
It's not as simple as, like, some people are bad, some people are good.
Maybe evil is a real element that you have to fight in life.
And that maybe this is just something that's been documented all throughout history, but our arrogance and our secular society wants to keep us from recognizing that as an actual factor.
But see, to me, this is when we talk about critical thinking.
This is the stuff that when you really sit down and you have some conversations besides arguing whose team is better, you know, this is the type of stuff that you really have to get into some perspective.
You can learn a lot.
If you're willing to talk about things and you're willing to open up and you're willing to be wrong.
It's one of the things I'm always into is don't go into something with a predisposed opinion about it and be so hell-bent on it's your way because you might really get your mind changed or you might really learn something about it.
But as soon as you lock down on it's this way, you know, and that's...
I'm driving my big RV cross-country with my family.
Every year we do a big, huge road trip with the family.
This hawk flies outside of my window.
Five minutes.
No shit.
It was a real five minutes.
Flew along the freeway with me.
As fast as I was gone.
Dirt road.
So I asked my mom who was the lady to call.
So I went and had this thing.
Didn't know me very well.
Didn't know much about me.
I had the most mind-blowing experience.
Like, mind-blowing.
And I had to really sit there.
I had to go back to my wife and my mom and say, Okay.
There's something out there that's going on that's...
I'm going that's bigger than us, than I can comprehend.
And the way I kind of, to make sense of it for myself, because I have to make sense of it, is if you're a baby laying in a bassinet and you can smell and you can breathe and you can poop and you can eat and you can sleep and giggle, but I can talk to you, I can talk to you, but the baby can't understand me.
But there's some transmission of connection, you know, make it giggle.
At this stage, am I the baby in the bassinet?
And my sister's trying to talk to me, and I'm just kind of getting it, but is that possible?
The older I get, the more I start to buy into, there's got to be something else.
There's no way it can be all this and not be something more.
It just didn't vaporize, go away.
So, the other day, maybe six months ago, I sat in a hot tub.
I've got my routine of hot sauna, cold plunge, hot tub, infrared.
I do all that.
But I'm sitting there, and I keep getting this thing.
I've got to call this medium lady.
And I text her, and I said, hey, can I come see you?
And she goes, yeah.
She goes, your dad's been hitting me up quite a bit.
So it was funny because when I said to the medium, I said, "I'm here.
Where's my sister?" She said, "Oh, she doesn't need to talk to you." I said, "What the f...?" I said, "I just made this whole thing to come here." She said, "She talks to you every day.
She talks to you all the time." Because I was raising her kid.
My parents, he lived with my mom and dad, lived right next door to us.
Lori and I have the two boys, Hunter and Ryder, but we're all big family and within the same acre.
And I'm like, wow, it is happening.
I do.
I get all these things because I'm thinking about things I'm talking to Jules about and things I'm working with Jules about as a young boy and just all these things.
And a lot of it coming from things I think of my sister.
And I don't know.
This is way outside of the spectrum of anything I ever talk about.
I mean, I tell my close friends about it, and probably people watching this now saying, isn't that guy that does the show about the pizza?
Where's he coming off on this talking to his dad, the owl, the non-smart bird?
But I believe...
Well, we've seen the stories about somebody that's...
Autistic, and then they could just hear a song and play the piano.
This is really, our brains are so much more powerful than, you know, than we, it's like talking to people from, I have a buddy of mine that's from Germany.
He speaks four languages.
He's a pretty smart guy, but he speaks four languages.
So they all, you know, most of them all know how to speak a second language.
But once you can learn a language and learn the, you know, how to adapt to languages, you have the opportunity to, you know, be more, you know, available to learn other languages.
I just, you sit there and look at it and go, man, do we not utilize, how much of it do we use?
Yeah, we distract ourselves with a lot of nonsense.
But that's also the difference between an athlete and a sedentary person.
Obviously, your body can do a lot more than you're asking of it.
But there's something about autistic kids.
They tap into some aspect of the brain that's just unavailable to you and I. There's this one kid who flew over Manhattan in a helicopter and then did an absolutely picture-perfect, detailed drawing of the skyline.
Working with intellectually disabled adults and kids.
Had a cousin with intellectual disabilities.
I just thought everybody had a cousin that was, you know, a little different, a little unique.
And super major part of our family, Doug.
And so I heard about, I learned about this program, Best Buddies, and it was started by Anthony Shriver, who's Eunice Shriver's son.
Eunice Shriver started the Special Olympics.
And Sergeant Shriver was the star of the SEC.
You know, the Shriver, the Kennedys, that whole group.
Do you know what I'm speaking of?
So anyhow, I work with this program.
And I work with these intellectually disabled adults and kids called Best Buddies.
And when I got involved, it was Tom Brady hosting a celebrity football game at Harvard.
And everybody would come and get involved and the buddies that were athletic would participate.
And I was just there because I was invited to go.
So I had to do something.
So I cooked.
I made appetizers for the event.
And it was so funny how these buddies would gravitate towards me.
And they wanted to cook.
You know, food's that common denominator of all people.
And so we really have developed the program into this Best Buddies program where we got all the buddies partnering with chefs.
And the buddies love to do the repetitive, love to, things that are laid out, organized, and put them together and so forth.
But just an amazing group of people.
And huge hearts and huge energy and huge, never a bad day.
Always a smile.
Always happy.
Always want to give you a hug.
You know, there's just so many.
But again, when we were talking about things that get glazed over, things that get, you know, you had school, you had the special ed group, and they went off to their space.
And we never really, I think, educated people how to work inside or work with or understand or have the compassion to understand, you know.
People with disabilities.
And fortunately, I think we're getting better at it.
I think our country is – our world is starting to – but when we can look at that and take that appreciation and see that and not see that as weird but take that and appreciate it and think it and say, wow, here's somebody that's taking a difficulty or a major difficulty and doing something with it.
And I think that's – we need to be more – we need to open our minds up more.
Like I was just saying, when that now becomes, because we can chronicle it and we can see the video of it and it gets on social media, we can be aware of it, there's the positive side of social media.
But there's so many of these buddies, like this young lady got up and sang the other day at this event.
And, you know, very non-communicative when you just see her on the stage.
But once she got on stage, she just blossomed into this other person.
So I think that we're hopefully starting to take some recognition to the fact that there's more potential and it should be recognized.
But then do we have some of these people that we don't call them savants?
But there's some people that have invented some shit and created some stuff and took some recognition, some awareness to...
Bacteria's becoming, you know, Louis Pasteur.
I mean, there's some people that have some higher thinking power that you've taken us down some paths that, you know, it's like the computer and all of that.
I mean, I can lose, you can lose yourself in it that somebody was able to, I do it with architecture.
When I look at a building and you look at these gigantic skyscrapers.
And I'm happy when I can build a woodshed that's square, you know, that everything lines up correctly.
But somebody's going to do this out of steel and cement and glass and all this thing.
And they just build that and it's perfect.
And you just look at that and go, wow, what goes on in their mind?
Because I'll make you a really good pasta dish right now.
Anybody who says that there's no such thing as a 9-to-5 job, I work every single day.
All the time.
I mean, if I'm having fun, if I'm ripping it up, I'm at stage, I'm having fun.
But it's always going to be where it's always coming back to taking care of business.
But I just think that when people start getting lost with that, one of the things I hope that the nucleus around these kids is that we foster imagination, foster critical thinking, back to what we're saying, and foster them into achieving.
Help them write goals.
Help them have belief.
You know, we can't just set them away.
They're getting lost in their phone and believing that they're going to be a TikTok star.
I got 82 million men are reported to subscribe to OnlyFans.
It might be overstated.
But this also weirdly says that the platform had 1.2 million American women, so that's almost all of them are 18 to 24. And this also says there's 3 million registered creators, so I don't know who the other one point.
And for a lot of these girls, it's like they just don't want to have a regular job, and then they get caught up in this OnlyFans thing, and then you make a lot of money.
Yeah, and people need to make a decision in their own mind that they want to accentuate the positive aspects of their own life and stop dwelling on the negative and move forward and try to be a positive influence in as many ways as they can.