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June 26, 2023 - Viva & Barnes

01:39:04

Interview with Chef Andrew Gruel - From Politics to Covid to Social Media! Viva Frei Live

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	Sorry, I should have given everyone a trigger warning.
	You're going to see the breaking down of a massive tuna.
	There's a little bit of blood.
	But the head, we scratch all the meat around it.
	It's actually fascinating.
	Let me get the link for this and share it with everybody.
	I'm going to cut one side of the head and now I'm going to cut the other side of the head.
	Remove the head first.
	We won't go through the whole thing.
	The link is in the chat.
	Look at the size.
	This is a small...
	The meat in there.
	Look at all the meat inside the head.
	The belly is the best meat of the food.
	That's where the toro is.
	That's where the...
	Beautiful part.
	The best part of the meat comes from right there.
	The toro side.
	The belly side.
	You see the line there?
	That's the line that you follow.
	How much they paid for that fish?
	It was many thousands of dollars.
	I don't remember exactly how much.
	Alright, we'll stop here.
	It's an amazing dissection of the animal.
	He had the sharpest knife.
	Look at the way the knife slices through the body.
	The quality of that fish.
	And this is probably the best sushi place in Montreal, if not Canada.
	All right, everyone can go watch the rest of that afterwards.
	See, we don't always have to start...
	Look at the beautiful piece of meat.
	And his tools behind him.
	Oh my goodness.
	All right, that's Park Restaurant in Montreal.
	Antonio Park, Chef Park, when I was a lawyer, was my client.
	I'd not say my favorite client.
	Some were, you know...
	You don't compare clients like you don't compare children.
	Some files you don't like quite as much.
	Chef was...
	One of my favorite clients and makes the best damn sushi on earth.
	And it's apropos.
	Look, I'm starting with that instead of starting with the latest Twitter fight that I've gotten into.
	I'll do that tomorrow.
	And we don't have another world-renowned, you know, salivate-type-inducing, salivation-inducing chefs, Chef Andrew Grohl.
	If you don't know who he is, you'll know now.
	Now, I think a lot of us were in the same political sphere.
	I guess we call it the red pill, the red pill sphere of the interwebs.
	I think a lot of you watching now know who Chef Gruul is by his Twitter feed.
	If you don't know who he is, you're gonna know who he is in thorough detail by the end of this.
	He's in the backdrop.
	We're live on Rumble.
	Let me refresh and just make sure.
	Okay, it looks good.
	Looks good.
	Okay, it is good, but now I'm getting an ad.
	All right, hold on one second.
	Okay, so we're good on Rumble.
	We're good on vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	No medical advice, no legal advice, no election fornification advice.
	You all know how the support works.
	vivabarneslaw.locals.com is our Locals platform.
	You can get merch at Viva Frye, all that other stuff.
	Superchats, Rumble rants.
	We've got a Viva Barnes Law Locals community thing going on right now, so I'll get to some questions that the community has for Chef Gruel.
	But not to waste too much of an intro time.
	Chef Andrew Gruul is in the house.
	If you don't know who he is, you're going to know who he is.
	Chef, I'm bringing you in in 3, 2, 1. Sir, how goes the battle?
	It goes.
	We're battling.
	I've been boning up on your podcast.
	I knew enough about you.
	You read Wikipedia.
	It gives you the basics.
	I listened to your podcast on Rubin or your interview with Dave Rubin from 2021.
	And what's amazing is listening to these things two years down the line.
	Much of what was, you know, it ages very well depending on what side of the blue pill, red pill divide you were on.
	Listened to on Eliza Blue.
	Interesting stuff.
	So I know, I think I know everything about you that you've publicly disclosed, but we're going to get into a little more today.
	Before we even get into it, let me make sure what I'm thinking about here.
	Now we'll get to where people can find you at the end of this, but everyone's going to know.
	Who are you?
	30,000 foot overview.
	And I hope you know that I like to delve into childhood to understand the present adult.
	But who are you?
	For those who don't know.
	Hey, I'm America's chef.
	I'm a chef and culinarian.
	I've been on various TV shows, Food Network, FYI Network.
	But right now I own Calico Fish House in Huntington Beach, California.
	I previously owned Slapfish, which was a 28 unit fast casual chain that I started as a food truck back in 2011 and grew to a franchise.
	And now we're just doing it all over again.
	Actually, we're going to break all that down because one thing that's fascinating, you know, there's the culinary side of being a chef and then there's the business side.
	And having been a lawyer, you know, dealt with chefs, restaurants and franchises, it's a very complicated thing that you're going to have to flesh out for us.
	First question first, I think I know the answer, but chef, your last name is Gruul Real or Fake?
	Hey, that's real.
	It was a calling, you know.
	Everybody, that's where people trash me on Twitter.
	Why would I trust a chef named Gruul?
	But the thing is, I make the best darn porridge that you could ever have, and I promise you that.
	I remember the day when the word of the day on Wordle was Gruul, and then you tweeted out, I'm today's Wordle.
	Yep, for those who didn't get it back then.
	Okay, so let's back it up all the way to the childhood.
	Gruul as a last name.
	Is of Germanic origin, if I'm not mistaken, and I think it actually means victorious, of Germanic origins.
	I mean, you're from New Jersey.
	Where are your parents from?
	How long have you been in America for?
	What's childhood like?
	Yeah, so I'm from New Jersey originally.
	Both of my parents, we grew up in Jersey.
	My father, the name Gruhl, is German.
	I actually grew up speaking German.
	My father was stationed in Germany as well in the U.S. Army.
	And now my mother's side of the family is all Italian.
	So I'm half Italian, half German.
	So my family was from Staten Island, the Italian side of it.
	So obviously we've got that culinary side with the Italian piece of it.
	But, you know, I'll tell you childhood wise, I actually grew up, I was a Lashki child, right?
	So I did not have those gourmet dinners and I don't have the stories of rolling pasta with my grandmothers.
	I grew up on Sara Lee and anything that could fit into a microwave.
	I actually thought that eggs were microwaved until I was about 13 years old.
	So for me to end up in the culinary industry is pretty funny to the whole family.
	What does a latchkey child mean?
	It means both my parents worked all day, every day.
	So I was kind of fending for myself while they were hardworking parents trying to do what they do and give us a good upbringing, my sister and I. So I cooked a lot at home as a result of that.
	That was the trouble that I got into.
	So, two kids in the family, you and your sister?
	Yep.
	And parents still alive?
	Yep, both still alive, still in Jersey.
	Mother's still working, father retired, and my dad spends his winters in Florida, so that's my Florida connection.
	And let me ask you this, if I may, what did your father do?
	What does your mother do?
	Did they do the same thing throughout their lives, or did they bounce around jobs?
	Yeah, my dad, you know, it was funny.
	My dad actually was a finance guy.
	He went to college, he got his MBA, and then after getting his MBA, he got drafted to Vietnam and was like, well, I'm going to go and do my patriotic service and was supposed to go to Vietnam.
	And at the last second, as they were all actually going to board planes, it turns out there was a finance officer who was either moving up or...
	Being promoted or retiring out at a base in Germany.
	And my dad got pulled off the line and ended up in Germany doing finance with the troops out there as a result of his educational background.
	So narrowly missed a bullet there, pun intended.
	And my mother is an urban...
	And then he ended up in finance, specifically on the corporate side of things.
	Mother is an urban planner.
	She started her own firm.
	So she does urban planning, design, development.
	She's a professor as well as owning her own firm at Rutgers University.
	And so we grew up looking at curb cuts and parking lot designs.
	Okay, that's very interesting.
	So your dad was drafted to NAMM.
	You're born in 1980, so this is before either of them were born.
	Ends up in Germany.
	For how many years was he in Germany?
	Two years.
	All right.
	And then growing up, he didn't serve any more growing up.
	He wasn't away from home for that reason growing up.
	It was work between your parents?
	Yep.
	It was work between the parents.
	Exactly.
	You know, my dad had a, he was an inner city kid, pretty rough upbringing.
	So for him, it was about, you know, working his butt off and always trying to provide for us.
	So, you know, they worked, they were around as much as possible, obviously, but, you know, they were hardworking parents.
	And how many generations American, I'm always fascinated by this, like how far back can you trace your family in the States?
	So my grandfather did come over from Italy right before my mother was born.
	So they were just, you know, she was the first generation in America coming over from Italy.
	And my father, their side from Germany, I think was probably about the same.
	Okay.
	And Germany as in the Germanic side, not the Jewish side of Germany, of those who fled during the war or before the war?
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Okay, fascinating.
	Two kids.
	Parents are out the entire time.
	The level of which you get into trouble consists of in the house, where you were not a troublemaker as a kid, not getting into trouble in school, just pretty, I say not ordinary, but trouble-free, except for the hell that you were raising in the house?
	Pretty much.
	I mean, you know, I was a class clown, but other than that, you know, I enjoyed academics to some degree and was into sports and athletics, but, you know...
	For me, it was, I always tell this story, I used to actually as...
	As dorky as this sounds, I would skip school, not to go party, but I would stay at home and I would watch the old PBS cooking shows, kind of those dump and stir cooking shows, Yann Kahn Cook and Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, and I would try and recreate that in the kitchen at home.
	My mother would sometimes come home early on a little surprise visit, perhaps a meeting, or she wasn't testifying in the nighttime, which is what she would do, right?
	Daytime was working, nighttime she would go and represent these cities and testimony about...
	How they're redeveloping their cities, kind of the city structure and the plans.
	And she would just find butter wall-to-wall or small fires on the stove.
	And that was my trouble.
	And I ask only to try to understand how those who have become sort of vocal critics against the system as adults, what they were like as kids, that I compare to my life and say, you know...
	I project that everyone had to have been a hellraiser, rebellious, troublemaker, problem child to have grown up to be, you know, what was a liability as a child growing up becomes an asset in terms of critical thinking as an adult if you can make it through relatively unscathed.
	1980, so you're 43 years old.
	Public school in Jersey?
	Public school and then private school.
	Because I was getting in a little bit of trouble and my parents, my dad knew the admissions director.
	He actually had served with him at a local private school.
	And it was funny because I was a bit of an outsider going to private school.
	Where we were from, there was a private school near there, but most of the kids came from a real rich area of New Jersey.
	Be, you know, driven in by their private drivers to this private school.
	So I absolutely hated it.
	I was into punk rock and skateboarding and all of that.
	So I was a bit rebellious at that point.
	And then when they told me I had to go to private school, that was just way too troublesome for me.
	And so I got to understand authority pretty well.
	But I also, there was a deep honor code at our private school, which I appreciate now looking back on it.
	And, you know, that kind of honor code and that moral compass that they built out for us has stayed with me for years.
	And not a religious private school?
	It was not religious.
	However, I was an altar boy for many years.
	I grew up Roman Catholic and was very involved in the local church community.
	Okay, fascinating.
	Now, you fast forward a little bit.
	People always ask how someone gets into becoming a chef.
	There's culinary school, and then there's sort of the other way around, which is sort of accidental for some.
	What did you study after high school?
	How did you get into the world of being a chef cooking?
	Well, that is a funny story.
	You've got to get a job when you're 14, 15. One of the first jobs that I got was in restaurants.
	That was my high school job.
	I absolutely loved it.
	I loved the fast pace of the restaurant industry.
	I loved food.
	My dad was involved with AAA, right?
	So that was who we worked for.
	And they did a lot of rating of restaurants.
	So we kind of understood that growing up.
	And I did travel with my dad a bit for some of his business trips and got to love food.
	And so that was why I was like, oh, I want to work in restaurants.
	And then ultimately worked at some finer dining restaurants before I went away to college.
	I went to a small liberal arts college up in Maine.
	It was called Bates College.
	It's like 1,700 students.
	And my major was actually piano performance and philosophy.
	So that's what I was studying for the first two years that I was there.
	While I was there, naturally you get to college, your parents are like, you've got to still get a job, you've got to pay.
	And I was also an athlete.
	I was a runner, distance runner.
	And I started working at lobster docks, working in various restaurants along the coast of Maine.
	And this ultimately does come full circle to my concept.
	But after about a year or two, I realized I was spending...
	Way too much time working and in kitchens than I was in class.
	My grades started to go down.
	I ended up quitting running, but it wasn't because I was screwing around, although I was a little bit, but I was just so involved in the restaurant industry.
	So naturally, I said, I'm not going to waste any money or time here, and I'm just going to completely immerse myself in restaurants.
	And I left college.
	I actually hitchhiked from Maine out to Wyoming.
	I got a job with the Grand Teton Lodge Company over the summer of what would have been going into my junior year in college.
	I worked for the Grand Teton Lodge Company as a chef out there after hitchhiking from Maine to Wyoming, or Montana rather, actually.
	I went to Montana first and then took a bus down.
	And after that, it was, you know, it was then I got the full bite, ended up doing my apprenticeship out in Oregon, and then I went back to school to get my culinary arts degree and then ultimately my food service business management and food marketing degree.
	How old are you when you're hitchhiking across the country?
	19, 20. I don't know if your parents are anything like mine.
	Were they terrified?
	Were they absolutely opposed to this?
	Did they realize, you know, if they love you, they have to let you go type thing?
	Because I think my parents would probably kill me before letting me do that back in the day.
	They didn't know about any of this.
	Now they do.
	But at the time, they just thought that I was taking a train across the country to get my job.
	They knew that I had a job.
	I had that lined up.
	And so everything in between was a bit improvisation.
	And Grand Tetons, the most beautiful place on Earth, or tied with other places?
	I mean, Grand Tetons was amazing.
	I got out there working there in April.
	And, you know, it says the snow is melting, and spring is turning into summer before the tourist season hits.
	I mean, it was the greatest summer of my life, and it was absolutely amazing.
	It truly, truly was.
	It is the most beautiful place, one of the most beautiful places in America.
	We talk a lot.
	I see it on social media, people posting about how we don't take advantage of our national parks enough.
	And that is true, because there's kind of an environmental blessing.
	You know, it's funny.
	I was into specifically environmental literature and environmentalism, and I hitchhiked across the country to try and become my own Jack Kerouac, if you will, or Edward Abbey, what have you, any of these kind of 60s, 70s, environmentally focused beat writers.
	And I absolutely loved it.
	And that's actually been the cornerstone of my business has really been this environmental push.
	I just got done in an ACC conference, which is the American Conservation Coalition, and it's all about free market environmentalism.
	So I've made that a big piece of my platform now, kind of on a go-forward basis, because I still consider myself an environmentalist, although there seems to be some dissonance there, because you can't be a libertarian or you can't be free-minded and also be an environmentalist, according to many people on Twitter.
	There's a few questions in terms of the environmentalist side about getting meats from...
	What do they call them?
	Responsible sources, which we're going to get to because I have a list of questions from locals that we're going to get to.
	So you spend the summer in Wyoming, Grand Tetons.
	Then you go back and you get...
	What is it?
	Is it called a culinary degree?
	A chef's degree?
	Well, first it was an apprenticeship, right?
	So you've got...
	Ultimately, you can either go to culinary school or you can do your apprenticeship.
	An apprenticeship is where you actually work under a world-renowned chef or a...
	You know, just a classically trained chef and you learn the basics, the fundamentals.
	It's the same thing that you would learn in culinary school.
	And it's all that kind of classic French brigade system, sauces, soups, the foundations of cooking, your mother's sauces, all classic French Escoffier style.
	So I did that for a while at a...
	Actually, the hotel was Timberline Lodge, and it was like a Swiss MasterChef.
	Timberline Lodge is where they actually filmed the exterior shots from The Shining.
	On the top of Mount Hood, it's the only place in North America where there's actually skiing.
	Year-round because of the glacier that sits on the front of it.
	So I lived up there and worked like 80 hours a week, lived in a little cabin at the base of the mountain.
	I would hitchhike to work in the morning with my snowboard, and then I would get off work.
	This was like 6 a.m., and then I would get off work at 10 p.m., and I would actually put a headlamp on, and I would snowboard through the trees all the way down the mountain home every single day.
	So it was the coolest experience in the world while I was going through this education.
	Well, damn it.
	Now I'm actually extremely, extremely jealous of that visual.
	Okay, amazing.
	So the apprenticeship, how long does it take to get, I mean, I'm not saying credentials matter, but do you get an official recognition, accreditation after this apprenticeship that allows you to then say, I've done this and I'm certified-ish?
	Yeah, you can.
	Mine wasn't an accredited apprenticeship because I knew I ultimately did want to go back and transfer my college credits to get the full bachelor's and get the degree and then ultimately go back to business school at some point.
	So for me, it was more about just the, you know, it's kind of...
	You do the apprenticeship, you learn the system, you work your way through the restaurant, through the brigade, if you will, from kind of dishwasher to saucier to young chef de partie, which is like a banquet assistant, and then ultimately through the line, dining service, breakfast, you name it.
	I mean, it's every single aspect.
	You don't necessarily learn the formal business aspects of it, but it's all hands-on culinary, the artistry of it.
	Okay, excellent.
	And then you go then afterwards to get a business degree.
	Yeah, then I moved to Denver.
	Denver, Johnson& Wales University, which is one of the largest...
	Johnson& Wales University and CIA are the two largest accredited culinary institutes and colleges in the United States.
	So I wanted to stick around kind of in the mountainous region.
	So I went to Denver.
	The JU...
	Law campus turned into Johnson and Wales, or the DU law campus turned into Johnson and Wales.
	It was like the third year the new culinary school was open.
	So I went there, transferred my credits, and got my culinary degree while simultaneously working and almost continuing forward of my apprenticeship, but more of kind of an internship with a certified master chef in Colorado.
	So there was only, at the time, about 50 certified master chefs in the world, which is a formal accreditation program, and I worked under one of them.
	One of the few in the United States for two and a half years while I was going to school.
	Okay, phenomenal.
	And now, I don't know what age we're at here.
	We're about 22, 23 years old?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, roughly.
	So culinary school.
	People imagine you learn what types of foods mixed with what type of training actually goes into the school?
	What types of classes do you have?
	How fascinating is it for anybody who's thinking about it?
	Or is it tedious and there's a lot of basic stuff and then a lot of technical stuff?
	Yes, so I came at it from an experience that I already had a lot of culinary skill.
	Did it backwards, right?
	So I didn't understand intellectually the fundamentals of what I was doing, but I could understand how to make all of these things.
	And I had muscle memory in the kitchen and I understood the systems.
	So I was a bit older and I was transferring credits, right?
	So this was the coolest experience in the world for me because I loved what I was doing and I knew this is what I wanted to do.
	I was in there with some people who are a bit older than I was, who had, this was a second career, and then a lot of young kids.
	And the young kids who went to culinary school, you know, they didn't appreciate it.
	They didn't appreciate what they were doing.
	We're getting into there.
	Parents wanted them to go there.
	They wanted to become the next Food Network star.
	So it was a real mix of people.
	But what I tell people now is that don't go to culinary school until you've actually gotten some kitchen experience and some real-world experience because you'll appreciate it a lot more and it will actually make sense.
	It's not all just kind of book smarts.
	So for me, having had all of this experience and then going to this brand-new culinary school, it was the most amazing thing in the world because you have the Top-of-the-line equipment on absolutely everything.
	And you'll spend a full course, which would be, it was 12 weeks, just doing meat cutting, right?
	So bringing in primals, understanding meat cutting, chicken, lamb, everything from that perspective.
	Then you'll do a 12-week block on just sauces and soups.
	So you'll learn all the mother sauces.
	Then you'll do a 12-week block on- Hold on, stop, stop, stop.
	What does a mother sauce mean?
	A mother's sauce are the foundation of all classic French sauces, right?
	So bechamel, espanol, tomato sauce, hollandaise, velouté, and demi-glace, right?
	So every single French sauce is a derivative of one of those sauces.
	When Escoffier wrote his culinary bible, he started with the mother's sauces, and then he did sauce like 27, and that was, you know, demi-glace, which is basically a classic rich beef gravy with a little bit of tomato in it.
	And then the next sauce, sauce 232.
	It was numbers.
	So you actually had to memorize thousands of sauces and then put this spin on each one of these sauces.
	That's how Escoffier, the grandfather of cooking, taught all of his young cooks.
	And in kitchens all the way up until the 1970s or 80s before Hout Cuisine took over, everything was a foundation of Escoffier's Bible of cooking.
	That is so cool.
	Okay, that's amazing.
	You learn the basics now, cutting meat.
	And there is a science to it.
	We started off this video with breaking down a tuna.
	That's just breaking it down into its components.
	And then in terms of like, there's a science behind the grain, depending on how you're going to cook it, how thick.
	I mean, can there be anything more fascinating if you're into this than studying your passion?
	How cool?
	Let me back that question up.
	What does a class look like?
	People love this?
	Or are there, like every other class, people who are bored, they don't want to be there?
	And don't appreciate how beautiful what their learning actually is.
	Yeah, both, right?
	So you have people who appreciate it.
	And you've got, you know, kind of the really spoiled kids whose parents told them they had to go there.
	And, you know, they're just trying to sell dime bags on the side.
	This was, you know, for me, it was...
	Just an unbelievable experience.
	And I pregated every single second of it.
	I was a brown noser.
	I spent more time with the chef instructors than I did with anybody else at the school.
	Because you've got the best equipment out there in the industry, right?
	Like your uniform, your shoes, your knife kit, everything is the absolute best of the best.
	And I knew that this was something that, one, I hadn't experienced.
	Because even when I was doing my apprenticeship and working in other kitchens, it was, you know.
	You're trying to create food off of broken burners and equipment that's half-functional.
	So to have the best of the best, I knew that that wasn't reality.
	So I definitely enjoyed it and kind of soaked it up.
	But there were two class blocks, right?
	The a.m. block was 6 a.m. until 2.30 p.m., and then the later half was 3 p.m. until 9 or 10 p.m., right?
	So I used to do the 6 a.m. until 2.30, and then I had my job that started at 3, and I would work from 3 until 11 p.m., and then I would drive an hour home and then turn around and do it the next day again at 6 a.m.
	So for a 21, 22, 23-year-old, you know, that was hard work, right?
	Everybody's going out and partying.
	They're just taking one class.
	I was working 60 hours.
	So for me, this was a lot of work.
	It was a push.
	Fascinating.
	It ends with a degree.
	What do you do after you graduate?
	So I left the job that I was running.
	I ultimately worked my way up to Chef D. Cuisine underneath this certified MasterChef, and then it was kind of time for him to release me into the wild.
	I ended up going back and working for the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, the original old-school Ritz-Carlton right on the Boston Common.
	Absolutely gorgeous.
	I was an East Coast guy, Yankees fan, so maybe I wasn't in friendly territory in Boston, but I went and worked in Boston for the Ritz-Carlton for a couple years.
	Into one year of doing that, I decided that 80 hours a week working at the Ritz-Carlton wasn't enough, so I actually would commute four days a week, and then I would still work full-time Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then I went back and got my business degree at In Providence at the college there.
	How many years did you do that for?
	I did that for a year.
	I was able to get the business degree in a year.
	Amazing.
	We know that you got into...
	We're going to skip ahead to the franchise, but I don't think we can.
	What happens in between?
	You're now, give or take, 26 years old.
	Yep, 26. What do you do for the next decade of your life?
	Well, so after I got my business degree, then I was deciding what I wanted to do.
	I was still cooking at the Ritz on the side.
	And my brother-in-law's brother owned a coffee shop and a cafe up in New Hampshire.
	And he was trying to expand his kitchen.
	And he had booked a ton of catering and his chef...
	So he called me and he said, can you work for me for two weeks, pull my kitchen together, get my business and books together, and blow out this catering season going into summer?
	So I went up there.
	One summer turned into a little bit over a year, and we opened up another two restaurants connected with his shop.
	So that was my first foray into being an entrepreneur, where we were actually opening and running restaurants and growing.
	I did that for about a year and a half.
	And then I went back to New Jersey and got back in the corporate scene, worked for Marriott as a corporate executive chef for a while.
	I had to get back to Jersey.
	I knew I needed to.
	And I knew I wanted a taste of the corporate side.
	So I did that for a couple years.
	And then in 2006 or 2007, I took a job in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
	I was a big music guy, still am.
	Loved punk rock, loved the old Bruce Springsteen element of New Jersey.
	And in Asbury Park, which had become a complete dump.
	They got bought out by a redeveloper, and they decided that they were going to redo the old Howard Johnson's Hotel and Restaurant right on the Asbury Park boardwalk.
	Iconic building.
	So I came in as the chef to redo that restaurant, which then we grew to a couple large restaurants into 2007, 2008.
	When the economy tanked in 2007, actually, I remember it was like October 12, 2007, the restaurant company I was working for downsized, and I lost my job.
	Never lost my job before ever.
	And I was actually going to go and open my own restaurant, but I was waiting for the economy to find some footing.
	So I got headhunted for, this is crazy, right?
	So I have a culinary arts degree, I have a business food service management degree, and I have another degree in food marketing I got, right?
	And my passion was sustainability and environmentalism.
	That was the foundation of my food for the previous five years, was working with local farmers and understanding our food systems.
	I got an opportunity to start a nonprofit sustainable seafood program at the Aquarium of the Pacific.
	It was a three-year grant from the Pacific Life Foundation, and the focus was actually getting consumers and Americans to eat more well-managed, sustainable seafood.
	The way in which they wanted it done, because 80% of the seafood consumed in California was done so in restaurants, was to bring in a chef who had a marketing degree to educate other chefs about how to serve sustainable seafood, what it means.
	I took this opportunity to run this grant.
	It was like a $600,000 grant for three years.
	Ultimately, after doing that for three years and working throughout California, understanding the restaurant industry and the seafood industry, I said, the reason people aren't eating enough seafood is because on the one end of the spectrum, you've got fine dining seafood.
	On the other end of the spectrum, you've got greasy fried seafood.
	But there's nothing in the middle that combines that quality of fine dining with the cost and convenience of fast food because consumers are concerned and confused about what sustainable seafood is.
	So I launched this business idea called Slapfish.
	Fish so fresh it'll slap you.
	I tried to raise money for it.
	Nobody would give me any money coming out of that recession.
	So I actually went down to a local food truck lot.
	This was before food trucks were the thing, before they were cool.
	And there was these guys that would drive around to construction lots.
	I said, how much do you make in a week?
	They said, we make about $800 a week.
	I said, okay, I'm going to give you $900.
	I'm going to take your food truck.
	I'm going to drive around to college campuses.
	I'm going to sell lobster rolls because I still had these connections from college to get fresh lobster.
	I'm going to sell lobster rolls and fish tacos.
	And if it works and I make more than $900 a week to cover the nut for these guys, then I'm going to do it for another week.
	So that was the birth of Slapfish, which then I went from one to five food trucks over a five-month period.
	And then I ended up bootstrapping for my first brick and mortar six months later.
	And then in four years, we had 10 restaurants.
	And then in eight years, we had 23 restaurants.
	That's fascinating.
	I don't know if I'm allowed to ask this, but I'm going to ask it here.
	Then we're going to go over to Rumble exclusively and just end this on YouTube.
	You get a $600,000 grant for three years.
	Obviously, you can't just take that $600,000 and pay yourself.
	So what are the metrics when you get that type of a grant in terms of metrics of success, guidelines or requirements in terms of how you disperse those funds or invest them?
	And before you answer that, ending on YouTube, people, come on over to Rumble in three.
	The link to Rumble is in the pinned comment of the chat on YouTube.
	We're going to get an answer to this question.
	And we're getting into the sustainability stuff.
	And then we're going to get into the politics, people.
	Come on over to Rumble.
	All right.
	Done.
	We're off YouTube now.
	So they give you $600,000.
	What are the criteria, the metrics of success?
	What you have to do with that money?
	What you're not allowed to do with that money?
	How much you can invest in yourself?
	How does a grant like that work?
	So my salary was predetermined based upon what I kind of worked directly with the CEO of the aquarium, who's a brilliant man, Jerry Schubel, taught me so much about everything related to marine conservation and kind of ocean stewardship.
	But the metrics were kind of built out with the...
	The CEO of the Pacific Life Foundation, who was ultimately the one who signed off on the grant.
	We determined that the number of restaurants that we were able to bring on board as partners to the program would be one of the metrics.
	There was an educational component, so we would have to justify how we were spending money in order to educate consumers and then how many consumers we could bring into the program.
	I knew that it was going to be difficult to get chefs on board with this program because they were trying to run restaurants.
	That was kind of my...
	The language I spoke, so I had to translate this properly to chefs.
	So what I convinced the aquarium to do was that if I could bring a restaurant on board to put the logo of our program on their menu next to the items on their menu that were sustainable by our standards, that whenever a consumer ordered that item, we would give them a free ticket to the aquarium.
	We would bring restaurants on board.
	Imagine going to a restaurant and you order the wild sockeye salmon and you get a free ticket to the aquarium.
	You want to bring your kids, so you order three more.
	You see, that's a way to financially incentivize people to eat more of the right types of seafood.
	I don't believe in demarketing anybody, so I'm not out there telling people what not to eat.
	I'm highlighting and celebrating.
	The good products and the good farmers from an aquaculture perspective.
	So that was kind of the angle that I brought to this.
	And I think it was incredibly successful.
	We brought about 100 restaurants on board throughout Southern California.
	But I was given part of the budget to hire.
	They were like, oh, hire an assistant or hire a marketing coordinator to help you with this program.
	I'm not going to do that because the one thing I understand is that science can be manipulated.
	What I'm going to do is I'm going to hire a marine biologist with a science background and a focus on aquaculture because I'm not going to be manipulated by fake science.
	So that was what I spent my money on, was hiring a real scientist to support the mission of the program.
	I actually think it was the smartest move we ever could have made.
	So I was backed with real science.
	You know, who knew that decades, a decade later, that, you know, science would be so subjective.
	But that was my focus.
	Well, it's very interesting in terms of explaining later skepticism from the experts when you've had that type of experience.
	It's sort of like the RFK junior type experience, having dealt with environmentalists and environmental experts.
	And you know how it seems that both parties seem to get experts that say exactly what they want to say.
	And you can sort of filter through that.
	It makes you more skeptical.
	More intelligent going forward.
	Okay, so now getting into the certification business.
	In my practice, I've come across, say, it's made me deeply cynical because you realize how more often than not those labels, those certifications, they're hogwash.
	They're oftentimes just licensed out for the sake of being licensed out.
	There's no real meaningful oversight or verification.
	And so the label makes you feel good about buying a product, but it actually doesn't assure you of any quality.
	It doesn't ensure any sort of...
	What's the word?
	Environmentalist or quality control.
	So in the industry, is there not that same type of fraud, for lack of a better word?
	Some of these tuna-free...
	Okay, sorry.
	So flesh that out for those who may not know what the nature of the fraud is and how you went about making sure that what you said was good was in fact good and not just licensed out a label saying it was good.
	Well, the first thing I wanted to do, understanding that we had kind of a meager budget, was to try and partner with some of these larger organizations, environmental organizations.
	And I dove into all of them, from Greenpeace to Sea Shepherd to Blue Ocean Institute, Sierra Club, you name it, right?
	They're all intertwined and they're all fighting for the same dollars.
	And the nonprofit world, I also realized, was a very, very competitive business, but it was very political.
	There's always a few people who control these purse strings, and you've got to say what they want you to say, and you've got to kind of play the game.
	It's about sensationalism, creating controversy, and ultimately scare tactics, fear-mongering.
	That's what this all came down to.
	Well, we didn't like that approach, so I did not do a great job partnering with these organizations, although I got to know all of them very, very well.
	You know, if I didn't demarket a particular product or say bad things about a particular product, then I wasn't going to be a partner of their program.
	But I wasn't going to do it.
	Now, I should also bring to this that I was very involved politically growing up, right?
	So I volunteered for two state senators.
	My mother was the first female commissioner of the police department in New Jersey.
	She was involved politically.
	Let me stop you there for a second.
	Which senators?
	Just so people can pigeonhole you politically, which senators?
	Were they Democrat, Republican, Libertarian?
	Who were they?
	I was, well, they were Republican, and I was the president of the Young Republicans Club.
	Oh, there you have it.
	You're done.
	You're done, Andrew.
	Okay, I'm tongue-in-cheek.
	So politically, well, politically, activist or, you know, involved in that type of sphere even as a kid growing up?
	Yeah, so I understood how it worked.
	I truly understood the framework.
	And I was in Model UN.
	I was in youth and government.
	We did mock legislature growing up in New Jersey.
	I wrote bills.
	I did all of that.
	I was the kid that would go to a field trip to Trenton, the state capitol, on the weekend.
	And you would write mock bills and you would have these kind of fake legislative sessions with other high schools and you would try and get your bill passed and you would try and build a quorum.
	It was literally a mock legislature.
	It was pretty fascinating.
	So I understood how all this worked.
	Now, I should say that as I went to college, I went to the most liberal college in New England, I think.
	And I was very honest.
	I really tapped into my kind of libertarian roots there because I was all over the place politically and have been.
	Since then.
	However, I understood from a foundational perspective how this functioned and how it worked.
	So when I got into this program at the aquarium, I was very skeptical of working with these government organizations.
	I worked directly.
	The National Marine Fisheries Service, their office was across the street from us.
	The aquarium was connected with all of them.
	NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that manages all of our oceans.
	We were very involved with them.
	I would speak at many of these events.
	I would go to all of these conferences.
	And I got very involved.
	Seafood is political.
	The ocean is incredibly political.
	I'll try not to digress too much in that regard.
	But what I did learn running this program was that we weren't going to scare people.
	We weren't going to scare them away from eating seafood.
	We weren't going to scare them by demarketing other proteins.
	And that the proteins that were being demarketed across the industry and that they were saying, we're going to run out of fish and we're going to overfish our oceans and we can't eat seafood anymore.
	It was all fake.
	It was all junk science.
	It was 100% about the money.
	And you still see it to this day, right?
	These environmental organizations are actually not friends of the environment.
	They're enemies of the environment.
	It is a financial industry for them to garner more money, to create more fear, to then garner more money.
	That's all they do.
	They don't actually...
	What does demarket mean, practically?
	So if I were to say, eat this product because this product is bad, right?
	So you see that oftentimes as the comparisons, right?
	We're bigger, better, safer.
	It's always about comparing and juxtaposing one product to another.
	I don't believe in doing that if you're trying to help and prop one industry up because at the end of the day, all boats rise with a high tide.
	So if you're trying to demarket another product, let's use wild salmon versus farmed salmon.
	The wild salmon industry and the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute, which this is very dangerous what I'm saying right now because they probably...
	We'll hate me, but they spend a lot of money towards trashing farm salmon and saying that farm salmon is the worst thing in the world.
	Friends don't let friends eat farm salmon, right?
	And then if you follow the flow of the money, Virginia Cruz did a big thing on this.
	Victoria Cruz, Virginia Cruz.
	If you follow the flow of money...
	From the demarketing campaigns, from the Alaskan Seafood Marketing Institute, through some of these environmental organizations, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, etc.
	They're all just creating this fear, raising money, and then giving it to each other.
	At the end of the day, there's no reason to demarket farmed salmon.
	You just educate consumers on it.
	Some is good, some is bad, right?
	They used to farm it in a way that was harmful to the environment and use chemicals.
	They don't do that anymore.
	It's actually not that bad for you.
	But what we found was that people just stopped eating salmon altogether, right?
	So it hurt Alaskan seafood as well because people stopped eating salmon because people don't differentiate between species.
	They think in constructs.
	So that was our approach, was not to demarket anything, was to really just celebrate the good from an environmental perspective.
	But that goes against the DNA of a lot of these organizations, because you can't celebrate the good.
	You've got to focus on the bad, because that's what scares people, and that's what gets people to give you their money, to try and save them from themselves.
	So that was really the foundation of what we did.
	And then I took it to a private...
	You know, the private side of things by starting my own business with that similar focus and then kind of putting my money where my mouth was.
	All right.
	And Slapfish, was your baby, was your business all along, like beginning to end?
	Yes.
	So I...
	So what I wanted to do was create a concept that was approachable and affordable, where you could get people to eat more seafood.
	At the end of the day, our mission statement from Slapfish was to get people to eat more of the right types of seafood.
	Increase the per capita consumption of seafood amongst all Americans, Canadians alike, right?
	Because our seafood industries are very connected, Canada and the United States.
	They're managed by the Department of Fish and Oceans.
	We're the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
	But our per capita consumption of seafood...
	Globally is lower than most countries, right?
	So Korea is like 90 pounds per person.
	The United States is only 16 or 17 pounds per person.
	And yet we have this Western diet.
	We have this overindulgence in omega-6 fatty acids because of all the corn-fed, soy-fed beef and chicken that we eat.
	And then ultimately a lot of the other stuff that's in our foods, soy, sugar, high fructose corn syrups.
	So we have this...
	Imbalance of omega-6 fatty acids.
	Six of the eight leading causes of death in the United States can be alleviated to some degree by the regular consumption of omega-3 fatty acids primarily found in seafood, DHAs, vitamin B, etc.
	So it was my perspective that if we got Americans to eat more seafood, that we decrease a lot of these Western ailments or these Western diet-focused diseases because we fix that imbalance.
	Now, ironically, that's become a talking point.
	Post-COVID, especially with all this seed oil craze, because the seed oil thing is all about that imbalance.
	It's one angle to take in terms of trying to fix that imbalance.
	So that was my focus in terms of trying to get people to eat more seafood because you bring down healthcare costs, right?
	And then ultimately that helps the economy.
	It takes away the power from the pharmaceutical companies and then the economy in its whole requires less subsidies and it's a stronger economy.
	So that was how I saw it from day one.
	Let me ask you this, because I don't think...
	If I don't understand it, chances are other people don't as well.
	What is the major difference between omega-6 and omega-3 fats?
	Yeah, so omega-3s are the good fats, right?
	Omega-3s are really good for you.
	The omega-6s, while they're not horrible for you, when you eat too many omega-6s, it causes inflammation in your body.
	So you need to balance them.
	Is the difference or the conceptual difference like beef fats, like solid fats versus...
	Seafood fats?
	I have trouble conceptualizing the difference between fats of animals.
	So the omega-3 fats would be only fish or lobster, shellfish, shrimp, that type of thing.
	Anything coming out of the ocean versus omega-6 would be only beef or does it include chicken as well?
	Omega-6 is primarily terrestrial-based protein and vegetables based upon the fact that they're being force-fed subsidized corn and soy, etc.
	You can have an omega-3 profile in beef and chicken based on what they feed them.
	Your free-range meat is going to be a lot lower in the omega-6 profile.
	Furthermore, think about it like this.
	LDLs and HDLs.
	HDLs are your happy cholesterols.
	And then the LDLs are the bad ones.
	And now they used to look at total cholesterol years ago, but now they look at that ratio of total cholesterol, LDL, and HDL.
	Your HDLs are your omega-3s.
	Your LDLs are your omega-6s, right?
	Those are the bad ones versus the good ones.
	Now, of course, you need both.
	But the omega-6s that we found is that imbalance in our diet leads to all of these inflammations, which is the foundation or the root of so many issues in our Western diet, hypertension, diabetes.
	Actually, one of the eight leading causes of death is car accidents.
	So I'm not suggesting that eating seafood is going to make you a better driver.
	Well, apparently, yeah, the people were suggesting that getting vaccinated would make you a better driver, for those who missed that thorough, insightful analysis.
	And we hear a lot of talk about inflammation.
	I'm not going to ask you this as a doctor.
	When people say the foods cause inflammation, what does that mean?
	What does that materialize like in the human body?
	Pain, joint pain, just generally feeling sluggish, tired.
	Inflammation in the body is, I mean, your body is inflamed on the inside and it's not operating at its maximum strongest capacity based upon what you're eating.
	And that happens as a result of eating way too much sugars, some of the chemicals now that they're putting in our foods, and then, of course, this imbalance in which I'm referring to.
	On the periphery of what goes into our food system and what's being fed to the animals that are raised or being sprayed on our crops, I mean, over the past 20 to 30 years, the chemical use in our foods has just gotten completely out of control.
	And that's all at the hands of the government, right?
	And I noticed that early on in my culinary career when I started reading the labels more diligently on both commercial food products and then ultimately retail food products, and it's just gotten...
	I mean, there were some great books written about it, you know, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman.
	There were some New York Times bestsellers on this.
	And what I find fascinating is that back in 2010, it was all about local foods and kind of, you know, unregulated food systems, right?
	Drinking raw milk and doing X, Y, and Z and pushing against this was big government, big ag, and big pharma.
	The left, the liberals, were the ones that were driving this revolution to eat local foods.
	They were the ones that were mad because they couldn't go to the farmer's market and eat unpasteurized cheeses at their elite parties.
	But then come 2020, they're championing big government, big pharma, big ag, big corporations.
	When it was their mission, back in 2010 when I started this program, I was considered just this crazy left winger because I was promoting sustainable, environmentally friendly food.
	And the narrative completely switched over a decade.
	And now I'm the conspiracy theorist when I talk about seed oils.
	I'm the conspiracy theorist when I tell the story of the Amish farmers.
	Who got raided by the feds because they were serving raw milk to those in their own community.
	Gosh, Andrew, there's a part of me, I am an idiot.
	I recognize that I'm an idiot, that I'm susceptible to influence by the media.
	Because I was brought up thinking, if you eat unpasteurized cheese or drink unpasteurized milk, you're risking your life.
	If you eat farm salmon, you're risking your life.
	I grew up, I thought, if I eat raw egg...
	I'm going to get sick and die, and that was it.
	And now, you know, we've been covering, between Barnes and I, we've been talking about the Amish farmer.
	He's representing Amos Miller.
	We talked about the case coming out of the East Coast, the Maine Lobsterman, where you realize how insidiously corrupt the whole labeling system is, and it doesn't actually pursue the objectives that they wanted to pursue.
	But now the question is, set that tangent aside.
	Explain to me the freakout or the craze about...
	Seed oils.
	I've seen it.
	I have not cared enough about it to get into it.
	What is the craze about the seed oils?
	Everyone says avoid seed oils.
	What is it?
	Educate us, for those who don't know.
	Well, a lot of the seed oils, right, canola oil specifically, you know, so many of these seed oils, they're in all of our foods, right?
	Sunflower oil, and they're highly, highly, highly processed.
	There's no nutritional value to them.
	I mean, it's one step away from petroleum, effectively.
	And these seed oils...
	Once again, they're in everything because they're not just a preservative, but they also have a certain taste to them, fattest flavor.
	Every food manufacturer uses them.
	They're in nuts.
	I mean, look at your almonds.
	They're going to be cooked in canola oil.
	They don't need to be.
	You can just pick a nut and bake it.
	And what happens is these seed oils, once again, it's all about these omega-6s.
	They're so rich in these omega-6 fatty acids that it's creating that inflammation.
	Just watch a video on how these seed oils are mass-produced.
	I think for me, I'm not kind of binary on my approach to this conversation.
	It's not all or nothing because I don't think you can fully get away from seed oils.
	But the seed oil craze has been the – it dovetailed out of the margarine craze.
	So if you go back and you read the history and you understand this push for hydrogenated fats and trans fats in the American diet, it all started in the 50s and the 60s.
	And it was about the merging of these massive food companies with the American Heart Association, which was nothing more than a propaganda arm of the government, who endorsed these...
	Endorsed margarine and these trans fats, which we've now since come to learn is the worst thing in the world for you.
	It's horrible.
	But for years, you couldn't even speak out against it.
	There's a scientist, and I'm drawing a blank on his name, where he actually came out and was like, margarine is horrible.
	You should not be eating any of these hydrogenated fats, these trans fats.
	They're going to kill you.
	It's going to create hypertension, diabetes, cancer, all of this horrible stuff, which we have now known to become true.
	He was completely blacklisted from absolute...
	Every single industry.
	None of his work was ever published again.
	He was never allowed to go to a conference again.
	I mean, he basically went into hiding.
	And there was a book written about this.
	And I got to find a name.
	I listened to it when I was traveling.
	I'm looking in the chat to see if anybody's getting the name first.
	Chef, I was brought up on that.
	Butter was bad.
	Margarine was good.
	Not to say that I don't trust anything anymore, but I don't trust anything anymore, except I trust people who are trustworthy.
	And which is why I've been...
	Following you for quite a while now, and it's fascinating stuff.
	Okay, so hold on.
	Okay, so we got the seed oils.
	Is there any consensus on the farmed fish versus the wild?
	Because I go to the store and I say, okay, wild, it might have more mercury depending on where it's feeding.
	Farmed, it's going to have antibiotics and whatever, depending if it's being fed pellet foods.
	Is there any consensus on farmed fish versus wild, or does it just depend on where it comes from?
	There's a consensus forming.
	So the perspective that I took when I started with the Aquariums program is the same perspective I have today.
	I have not changed that.
	And it's a little bit of everything, right?
	First of all, we always have to break things down into opposite constructs.
	So everybody thinks it's a yes or no question.
	It's farmed or it's wild.
	Well, there is no nuance to it, although it's in the industry.
	Let's take Alaskan seafood, for example.
	I bet people don't realize, and look this up on the Department of Fish and Game site, 60%, or maybe a little bit less, of Alaskan seafood starts off in hatcheries.
	So they actually will start in buildings, and they'll get the eggs, the row of the salmon, and then they'll raise them out, and then they'll put them in these open ocean net pens, and then they release them into the wild.
	And then the fishermen catch them.
	So that's stock fortification, technically.
	That's farming, if you ask me.
	Right?
	Like, that's not a truly wild species.
	But Alaskan Seafoods Marketing, they market salmon as always wild, never farmed.
	But that's a lie.
	That's the point.
	And it's not a bad thing.
	It's a good thing.
	You should celebrate the fact that you're utilizing aquaculture in order to fortify species of fish.
	In Southern California in the late 1980s, California white sea bass went commercially extinct.
	The science had been moving forward in order to take population samples of different fisheries or fish species, and they realized that no one was catching this fish anymore because it had gone commercially extinct.
	So Don Kent, who's a scientist with Hub SeaWorld, he created a program where they would fortify, they would actually raise these white sea bass to fingerlings, and they would release them into the wild.
	By utilizing this aquaculture, They were actually able to take it from commercially extinct to at its maximum sustainable yield within five years.
	They've completely re-fortified the stock and it's still wild, right?
	It's marketed as wild.
	You can eat California white sea bass everywhere.
	It's a great industry.
	So to say that farmed seafood is a bad thing is a lie, number one.
	If you've ever eaten an oyster or a mussel or a clam, they're all farmed.
	We've always been farmed.
	Farming's been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of years.
	The problem, okay, is where it's being farmed.
	Now, here's the irony, right?
	So get ready for this one.
	In the United States, 65% of the seafood that we consume, if not more now, is farmed, okay?
	85% of that is imported.
	We only inspect 2% of all the seafood imports by the FDA only inspects 2% of all seafood imports.
	Well, guess where all that seafood is farmed?
	China, Vietnam, Indonesia, countries that have no regulatory framework to farm their seafood.
	Well, you think to yourself, holy moly, and just so you know, true, one of the largest trade deficits behind oil and automobiles is seafood.
	So you think to yourself, well, why don't we just do it here in the United States?
	We are one of the only countries where you're not allowed to farm in the open ocean.
	We do not even have a regulatory framework in order to farm seafood in the United States.
	NOAA doesn't.
	The National Marine Fisheries Service doesn't.
	Because all the environmental groups have lobbied the government not to allow it to happen.
	And they say it's because of the environment.
	I don't believe that.
	It's because of their environment and all that they're doing, like they're doing with the green energy cars, is outsourcing the pollution to countries that don't regulate the environment so that we don't have to see the pollution here.
	That and, you know, maybe a little over-regulation in terms of salaries and work.
	I mean, not work conditions in a bad way, but it makes it uneconomical to do it here, even if there were the regulatory framework.
	But no, it's like the environmentalists are not saying no pollution.
	They're just saying no pollution in my backyard.
	And this is why I don't buy tilapia.
	First of all, I don't like the way it tastes, but I think like...
	90% of all tilapia in North America comes from China or China fisheries and nothing against China.
	It's just like, I would rather know that the food is local to the extent that I can.
	Sorry, I cut you off there.
	No, no, no.
	It's good.
	Well, the joke I make is when does an environmentalist, when does a developer become an environmentalist?
	Hold on.
	I think I'm going to get this.
	When does a developer become an environmentalist?
	Well, obviously, the punchline is going to have to be when it increases the value of the land, but I don't know how that's going to materialize into the joke.
	When they buy their house at the beach.
	Okay, that's good enough.
	All right, understood.
	So we won't farm in the United States.
	But it could be our number one industry.
	We've got the most innovation.
	We've actually produced much of the technology to be able to farm in a sustainable manner.
	Because if you think about it, the exclusive economic zone is 200 miles off the coast of America.
	So by way of drawing the exclusive economic zone off the coast of America, we basically own the majority of the ocean in the world.
	We have the largest ocean in the world by way of our exclusive economic zone.
	We could be using the deep water, we could be using the tides and the currents in order to farm in spheres, right?
	So you basically, you create these massive open ocean spheres that then move with the currents so that any of the pollution or the effluent, the poop coming off of these little spherical farms, they just get wiped away in the tides.
	I mean, it's negligent in the grand scheme of the ocean.
	And not to say other animals eat it like you'll end up, your shrimp and your lobster are going to end up eating the fish poop, which is what they do.
	Well, yeah, it actually helps the benthic environment.
	They found in Canada, specifically in Vancouver or off the Campbell River, that the areas in which they had fish farms in the more inland areas, that the benthic environment has been rehabilitated over the years because of the nitrogen in the fish poop.
	And they follow those out.
	So they'll grow.
	By fallowing, I mean they'll have a farm there for six months, and then they fallow it, and then they move it to another place.
	So there's environmental mechanisms in place whereby they can regulate this properly.
	We could have a massive industry here in the United States.
	So instead, what we do is we develop the technology, and then we ship it to Mexico, Costa Rica.
	We sell the technology to China, or they copy it, Indonesia, Vietnam, any of these other countries, and then we import it back.
	I mean, it's completely upside down.
	I'm not wrong also in...
	I think I understood this or learned this when I got into...
	Chef, let me get my dog.
	My dog has dried me crazy whining.
	Give me 30 seconds.
	Hold on.
	Hold on.
	Okay.
	Oh, sorry.
	We're in a different location, so the dog seems to have gotten stuck somewhere where she's paralyzed with the back legs and couldn't get up an unknown stuff.
	Farm oysters, farmed shellfish.
	On the one hand, I didn't fully appreciate that it could also be much safer and that you're not getting it out of areas which might have underlying pollution, but also that farming these things actually cleans the ocean out.
	These are the ocean's filters, and so in theory, not only is it not environmentally unfriendly, it's actually quite environmentally friendly to do this.
	Are these industries not being exploited, not being taken full advantage of in America?
	If we seeded oyster farms along all the coasts of America, especially in areas where there's a lot of outflow from agriculture, let's take, for example, the Chesapeake Bay, which used to be the most vibrant marine habitat, but then it became an...
	A dead zone because of all the fertilizers running down from New York and all those chicken farms.
	It killed.
	It became an oxygen dead zone, so it killed much of the sea life there.
	They rehabilitated it by seeding it with oysters.
	Oysters will completely clean a marine environment.
	It's fascinating.
	If we did that around the United States, we could have some of the cleanest oceans.
	But you can't get through the permitting process to do so.
	That's the problem, is that the way these things are over-regulated, the permitting process takes so long that you just can't get it done.
	It'll take 10 years.
	They've been talking about developing a permitting process for open ocean aquaculture managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA, and, I mean, it's been 10 years since I've been talking about it with the aquarium, and absolutely nothing has been done.
	Now, you can do some farming projects that's managed by the Department of Fish and Game or state jurisdictions.
	Coastal, but then you can also do land-based aquaculture.
	The problem with land-based aquaculture, while it's the most environmentally friendly, theoretically, because it's a closed-loop system, right?
	Like, you can really control it.
	Just imagine, like, an above-ground pool and raising fish in it.
	It's just so energy-intensive that it'll never be economically viable unless it's heavily subsidized.
	Okay, very interesting.
	Chef, we are going to get into the COVID stuff, and we got sort of sidetracked on all of this.
	No, no, I love it.
	It's fascinating, and I know people are very much interested in this now, especially getting healthy foods and seeing the attack on the Amish.
	So you have slapfish.
	I need to understand, how did you end up in Orange County?
	Of all places.
	So the aquarium program was in Long Beach.
	So I went from New Jersey out to Long Beach, which is basically the county right north of Orange County.
	And I lived in Orange County because I understood the difference in politics between Orange County and Los Angeles.
	And so I knew that I needed to start slapfish in an area that was...
	Interested in seafood and marine focus.
	Now, Huntington Beach, California, Surf City, USA, right?
	And this is a point I think that is very important if we're going to talk about lab-grown meat.
	But the stewards of the environment are the surfers, the fishermen, the people who utilize the ocean for business and recreation.
	No better place to understand sustainable and real seafood than in a surf community because these are the people that live and work the ocean.
	So when I opened Slapfish there, I knew that I would have an audience in which the notion of sustainable and well-managed seafood would resonate.
	Because in 2010 and 11, that was really just a buzzword.
	And it still is a buzzword.
	And the reason I draw that parallel with the lab-grown meat thing is, as I say, when we get rid of farmers and we put everybody in a white lab coat, those are the people that take care of the environment.
	So if this is all being done under the pretext of this is environmentally friendly, but you're wiping out all...
	Soldiers for the environment because you're putting them in lab coats and then big buildings blocked off from nature.
	All right, so you do slap fish.
	For a decade you run this.
	You end up franchising some of the locations out.
	It's not all owned by you the entire time.
	Yeah, so I started with one food truck.
	Went to four food trucks in five months, and then I sold those and then used that to bootstrap my first brick-and-mortar location.
	We bought an old dilapidated bagel shop for like $90,000 and made that our first location.
	And every week, sales would go up.
	We'd build a booth.
	We'd build a wall.
	We'd build another piece of the kitchen.
	This was true bootstrapping.
	And then I wanted to grow this thing and scale it as quickly as possible.
	That was ultimately my goal, which is why I did Fast Casual, which is where you kind of...
	Order at the counter, you get a number, and you sit down.
	Less expensive.
	Price point was around $10 to $15 for lobster rolls, good fish tacos, simply grilled fish plates.
	But I brought that kind of high quality because my finer dining background came in.
	I knew I needed to raise money, and I couldn't raise money, right?
	I was not the guy who had the father with a million dollars to connect me to some private equity firm.
	Nobody would loan me money.
	Banks don't lend money.
	Period.
	Thanks to the enemy.
	They will never loan money to a restaurant.
	And the only other way that I could grow and scale this thing quickly was franchising.
	So I very quickly learned what franchising meant, how to do it, how to register an FDD, how to become a franchisor.
	And I always joke, I say, once you become a franchisor, you go from being a chef to babysitting high net worth individuals.
	Yeah, I've had some limited professional experience with franchises.
	First of all, there's an animosity between the franchisor and the franchisee, and it's sort of like a landlord-tenant relationship when it's not done properly.
	When it's done properly, it's a symbiotic, wonderful relationship where the franchisors do what the franchisee wants to do but is incapable of doing just because scaling at that level is very difficult.
	You run this for a decade.
	You sold it in 2022 to...
	A football player?
	Well, so I brought on a partner in 2019, a large financial partner, Family Fund.
	Yes, he was a former football player for the Houston Oilers, and it was part of his kind of equity fund, if you will, to invest in restaurants.
	They were building out their restaurant division.
	So that capital helped us not just grow the infrastructure, but it also helped us through COVID.
	And that was really important.
	Okay, so you're in California.
	You're running this now from, we'll say 2012, up until the world shuts down in 2020.
	The world shuts down in 2020, and again, had this experience as an attorney who worked with restaurants.
	People don't understand what happened to restaurants.
	I mean, it's nice.
	Everybody says, well, businesses shut down, and it was particularly bad for some businesses, but I mean, it was the lights out for bars.
	It was lights out for restaurants.
	It was lights out for a lot of stuff.
	How does it happen?
	You're in California, and the word comes down, we're shutting down for two weeks, and it's all going to be fun and dandy.
	In two weeks, everyone can open back up.
	What did that do to your life when the orders came down, shutting down the world?
	Well, keep in mind, restaurants are a cash flow business.
	So you rely on tomorrow's cash flow to fund yesterday's debt.
	And restaurants are based on credit terms.
	This is not like every restaurant is sitting with millions of dollars in a bank account.
	Most restaurants have $5,000 in a bank account.
	Some days it's $50,000, and then payroll hits, and it's back down to $5,000.
	Then they build it up, and they build a clientele, and then hopefully you can sock some of that away over time.
	Restaurants are not profit machines.
	From our perspective, it was like, look, we're trying to build this business, and we're investing in infrastructure, and we've got expenses.
	You've got salaries.
	You've got electricity.
	Bills that are due.
	And when you can't, suddenly you shut down one day and there's no income coming in, you still have all those bills to pay.
	Like, everything is still due.
	So what ended up, the way it worked out is that when everything's shut down, it's not as if the people that you owe money to, right, your electric bill, your, you know, your linen bill.
	Your landlord.
	Landlord supplies, some of which are very perishable that you're not going to get rid of for two weeks.
	Yep.
	You lose all your product, number one, right?
	So you're sitting on $15,000 inventory per store.
	You lose all of that, theoretically.
	And then all your bills still came due.
	This is what people don't realize, is when the government drove the truck through the living room and said, shut down, nobody paused the bills.
	The bills were still due.
	The government didn't stop people.
	Yeah, I know that then it ultimately became a long-term debate about the student debt crisis and student loans, etc.
	Yeah, those people, the government said, you don't have to pay.
	And I know that ultimately the government got involved with the landlords, but not commercial landlords.
	Our bills were still due.
	Our landlords didn't care.
	So it was a real scary time because we had just taken on this investor and we were already in a financially precarious situation because we were putting out so much infrastructure way ahead of ourselves to then garner more revenue.
	That's how it works in business.
	Go look at the IPO or the financial statements of any massive restaurant and they're all losing millions of dollars.
	In the hopes to then get it all back.
	So we had all this inventory and we just kind of were like, look, we're not going to wait for somebody to tell us what to do.
	So it was kind of a fend for yourself, my wife and I and my family.
	And we just started cooking all the food we have.
	We started giving it away to people because we weren't going to let it go to waste.
	We had a ton of gloves in the restaurant.
	We actually had masks that we could get through the restaurant.
	So we opened up our flagship store to the public and said, look, you want food?
	You want toilet paper?
	You want gloves?
	You want...
	Masks, whatever you need, it's on us.
	We've got you taken care of.
	We're going to figure this out.
	And that was kind of like where I dove headfirst in immediately when the pandemic hit the day of.
	That was our approach.
	Just to let everybody know, I forget exactly what the stat is.
	Something like 80% of restaurants go belly up within one to two years.
	Is that it or is it worse than that?
	Yeah, it's around that.
	60 to 80, the numbers.
	There's a lot of books written about this, but let's just say restaurants.
	Restaurants have a high failure rate.
	So, COVID hits.
	This is where people are going to love you.
	You're sitting on restaurants.
	You have inventory.
	You have staff.
	I know of your business philosophy in terms of who you take on in terms of employees.
	Let the world know about this.
	And when it hits, you get up there and you start cooking and giving it away.
	What was your response when the pandemic hit and you had to do something?
	Yeah, I mean, for us, it was just about, it was, okay, how are we going to take care of our team members?
	How are we going to take care of our employees?
	I mean, these people are like family to us.
	They've been working with us since the food truck, and we know them, we know their kids, we know everybody.
	And they don't have lifelines.
	You know, nobody did.
	So we kind of took it upon ourselves to really act as that community center.
	And it wasn't just giving it away and helping out our team members, but also it was the first responders in the beginning, right?
	It was the police officers, it was the medical workers, it was the hospital workers, it was everybody.
	And, you know, we just kind of tried to go with every single day's bit of information as we learned that early on that there was no surface-to-surface spread.
	That wasn't highly publicized, crazy enough.
	But once we learned that that was the case, we started, okay, we wrote a playbook, right?
	Like, we had our own internal playbook for how to deal with avoiding cross-contamination and avoiding any types of interactions whereby COVID would be an issue.
	The one thing that we did, I think, that we didn't have any COVID.
	In our restaurants, with any of our team members.
	Now, ultimately, we did as obviously some of these new variants came out and everybody got COVID eventually.
	But in the beginning, we had none.
	And what I told my team members were, look, if you feel sick, if you came across anybody who was sick, if anybody in your orbit was sick or you're afraid, don't come to work and we'll pay you.
	I'll figure out how, but we're going to pay you.
	100%, we're going to keep paying you.
	So stay out for seven days if you have to.
	And I think what I saw in the restaurant industry, Was that nobody was paying anybody to take time off and the government wasn't providing any of that money.
	And so people were going to work sick and that's where there was a lot of this internal spread in tight kitchens.
	We didn't have any of that.
	And we built out our restaurant early on in order to be very friendly with takeout and delivery.
	I was driving food around to people.
	So we were able to kind of establish this financial lifeline by way of maybe pushing the envelope a bit.
	But for us, it was just about reading every day's data to understand what we could and couldn't do.
	And we didn't want to cross lines, but I think there was a consensus amongst people that socially distancing, at the time it was wearing masks, coming in and getting food wasn't an issue.
	We knew that within a week or two.
	You're reading your own data, Andrew.
	You're not allowed doing your own research.
	You have to defer to the experts.
	I was just thinking of this last night in getting ready for this interview.
	When did anybody determine, by the way of any study, that plexiglass dividers did anything?
	I'm just trying to relive it back in my memory.
	It just happened.
	There wasn't any studies that said, this is good.
	It's just, okay, you're going to have plexiglass dividers in all of your restaurants.
	Even for takeout, was there any research that you recall on that specific issue, plexiglass?
	No, absolutely no research.
	But I did see that it was kind of a way in which we could establish an artificial level of comfort with our guests.
	So we got the plexiglass quickly.
	And of course, it was nowhere to be found.
	I mean, I had to buy plexiglass out of the back of a Cadillac at 3 a.m. behind 7-Eleven.
	There was like a black market for plexiglass.
	But I think it was an extension of the mask, right?
	That's a typical process.
	It's like going big, right?
	Oh, we have this mask which blocks off where we breathe.
	So let's basically build big plastic masks everywhere.
	You know, I think that's what it was.
	But only to find out, right, typical unintended consequences is that it actually made it worse because it was isolating COVID.
	It was creating departments whereby it could breathe.
	Well, that's it.
	When they determined that good air circulation was the best way to...
	You know, maintain safety in public areas, setting up these little cubicles of enclosed air, and not just that, apparently it just created another surface that people had to wash or clean or keep clean.
	But now, one of the experiences, or one of the experiences, the experience of a lot of restaurateurs, at least in Quebec and Canada, given these orders, you know, just willy-nilly, put up plexiglass, you know, reduce your occupancy to one-fifth of your regular, whatever, and then...
	These restaurants would invest in all of this protocol compliance, only to have the government say either, we're still not opening up, and you've just blown $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 getting your store prepped up.
	I presume that was the same environment in California?
	100%.
	100%.
	It was the exact same thing.
	Plexiglass, gloves, masks, all the stuff that you had to buy now, new chemicals, only to not be able to open.
	Number one, in California.
	And then number two, for them to tell you that it didn't mean anything, right?
	It had no effect.
	We spent probably $15,000 on it.
	Hold on a second.
	Chef, you've gone more robot digital than before.
	Let me see if this is bad for everybody here.
	Hold on a second.
	Is Chef lagging a lot?
	Let me see if it came back.
	Okay, try it again.
	Let's see if we're smoother now.
	Yeah, you're moving smoothly.
	Okay, so sorry, what were you saying about the government imposing these requirements and then changing the, what do they call them, the guidelines from one day to the next?
	Yeah, I mean, the guidelines changed from one day to the next.
	And there were certain things where there was like consensus that we knew was real.
	Like I said, the no surface to surface spread, but yet still we had to wipe absolutely everything down.
	You know, we had to use...
	All these chemicals in order to do so and hand sanitize absolutely everything.
	It was just silly.
	We kept investing and investing and investing, but then we weren't allowed to open.
	At the end of the day, that's what it came down to.
	Regardless of the means by which they tried to get you to have a safer environment, they still weren't going to let you open.
	It was all conjecture.
	It was show.
	Now, when did you start?
	I mean, you've been involved in politics, Model UN, etc., etc., but I don't know that you were always so vocal on social media.
	When did you finally say, all right, the seal has been broken and I'm going to get vocal now, vocally, on social media platforms?
	When they shut down the beaches in Southern California.
	So we were getting ready for a huge 4th of July weekend because a lot of our restaurants had the ability to have outdoor dining and we would do caterings, right?
	Because 4th of July in Southern California is huge.
	People buy a bunch for catering.
	So we buy all of our product going into the 4th of July.
	I remember it was on like a Thursday.
	I mean, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of product.
	We staffed up to the brim and Newsom comes out and shuts down all the public beaches in Orange County.
	And it was the stupidest thing in the world because now what's going to happen?
	You're going to have everybody have private parties at the homes as opposed to out in these public spaces that are open air.
	And then you're going to end up exacerbating theoretically any of the spread because by their standards, now everybody's going to be indoors.
	Everyone canceled their trips.
	Business was dead.
	We lost all of that product.
	I still kept my staff on because I wanted to pay them.
	It was a massive money loss for us.
	And the fact that he could just pull the trigger at the last minute and completely ruin all of these businesses wasn't just us.
	It was everybody.
	And that's when I really started getting vocal and speaking out about it.
	And of course, then everybody attacked me as being, oh, you want grandma to die?
	You're anti-science.
	You're just an idiot, right-winger, blah, blah, blah.
	And I'm like, look, if you guys are going to put me in that category and there's no nuance to this conversation, then I'm going to go all in.
	And that's kind of when I really...
	Andrew, chat is saying maybe try closing down certain applications on your computer that you might not need to be running in terms of getting a smoother connection.
	You're in California now?
	Yeah.
	The internet connection...
	The joke is that the internet connection in Canada is oftentimes very bad because of our...
	Our communist government propensities, but this is coming from commie California, so at least it's the California connection, not the Canadian side.
	Okay, but even so, we'll work through it.
	It is what it is, as we say.
	So you start getting vocal.
	I mean, what's your reaction when people basically tell you to shut up and sit down?
	You've been in California for a while.
	Is the backlash you're getting on social media...
	Is it different, the same, or not at all the same as to the responses you get in real life daily in California?
	Is it noticeably not more toxic, but more exaggerated on social media compared to how everybody else viewed things in real time in California?
	Yeah, there was a lot more, and I was in Orange County, but there was a reasonable approach to this, I think, amongst most people.
	And yeah, social media exacerbated.
	It amplified the insanity.
	But even those handful of people that were insane, they came out.
	They came out.
	They would harass us.
	We got tagged and targeted by a lot of these Antifa organizations for speaking out.
	When I spoke out against Newsom specifically, I became a huge target.
	I went on a rant that went viral where I called Newsom an a-hole because he was shutting down outdoor dining in California going into the holidays.
	And that was the stupidest thing in the world because I could, as I said in the rant, I could go through Walmart.
	I could buy Burger King inside Walmart.
	This is 400 meters from my restaurant.
	I could go inside Walmart.
	I could get Burger King, and I could eat Burger King throughout Walmart without a mask on and pile on top of each other, buying products going into the holidays.
	But I couldn't serve people food outdoors at my restaurant 400 meters away in a huge open-air patio where nobody was near each other.
	Without hypothesizing too much or sounding too much like a conspiracy theorist, what is your belief as to the people who get angry at you?
	Are these like NPCs?
	Are these government-paid individuals?
	Or are these just genuinely fearful individuals who have bought into the government propaganda who now think that you're the reason why they are not safe?
	Both.
	But I will say this.
	There was a large group of...
	Very highly wealthy Orange County liberals who targeted us via Facebook groups and would start boycotts and they actually would have people stand out.
	Take photos of myself and my family or my wife and post them with me without a mask on, talking to a guest, calling me an anti-masker, calling me a COVID-idiot, all of these little terms that they created.
	They would actually stalk us.
	It was pretty sick.
	And business was great.
	We stayed open.
	Business was phenomenal.
	Business was like 600% up.
	I mean, it was...
	It was unbelievable.
	We had people driving two hours to come to our restaurant to support what we were doing.
	And it goes to show you that this parallel economy isn't a joke.
	It's a real thing.
	Do people understand who you are?
	How many employees do you have?
	Or how many did you have at April 2020?
	Well, directly under our control, corporately, we had over 100.
	But across the enterprise, we had probably 500 or 600.
	What are the, people are not necessarily all that in tune with the demographic of this industry.
	What types of workers do you have?
	Like, what types of people are these liberals, you know, the peace-loving liberals shutting down?
	What types of employees do you have?
	I mean, everyone from kind of, like, hard-working families, a lot of, you know, immigrants, mostly immigrants who work for us.
	It's 50-50.
	Families that they have to support who live paycheck to paycheck.
	And then you've got younger...
	High school and college students who are working to make a little bit of extra money on the side.
	And then you've got people who, this is their career, and they're using this as a stepping stone.
	Either they're in management or they're trying to get into management.
	The hospitality industry is one of the most diverse industries of all industries.
	They say six out of every ten people have worked in hospitality in some capacity in the world.
	So it's a pretty diverse subset of people.
	So you have people...
	Protesting, picketing, etc.
	I think a lot of us learned that the people who boycott and protest the most are not the actual ones spending the dollars.
	Any actual meaningful acts of violence, acts of vandalism, or mostly just noise?
	And did it affect the patrons of your businesses?
	It's one thing to sit outside and picket you as a far-right anti-vaxxer, anti-mask extremist.
	Were the patrons getting harassed?
	And if they were, did they care?
	The patrons weren't getting harassed.
	And, you know, we had some, you know, a little bit of vandalism at night, but nothing in front of the guests.
	I mean, I would say that we did lose some business from certain guests.
	You know, they've written to me and said, and we got, you know, they did the Yelp stream of like, this guy's a COVID idiot, etc.
	But Yelp shut some of that down.
	They allowed some of it to slip through.
	But once again, when you look at the metrics, our sales were up massively.
	And when I spoke out against Newsom, and that one went viral nationally, and I was thrown in the spotlight instantaneously, I started having a lot of people reach out to me, and they said, look, we want to help you.
	I mean, can we just send money to your restaurant?
	I said, look, I'm not going to try and grift off of this five seconds of fame.
	What I do need help for is that I have, when they shut down outdoor dining in December of 2021, I think it was, or the end of 2020, All of these people lost their jobs because you had, first of all, you had the holidays.
	When they shut down outdoor dining restaurants, we're like, we're done.
	We're totally done.
	We can't afford to have anybody on anymore.
	So all these people lost their jobs and were laid off.
	And then the government in California had misappropriated like $60 billion in unemployment money.
	I don't know if you recall that.
	Vaguely.
	All the people who were fired couldn't even get unemployment.
	The government's like, oh sorry, we'll get it to you in a couple months.
	So they shut down outdoor dining and they were like, sorry, nothing we can do to get you money.
	What are people supposed to do?
	When was it that they shut down the outdoor dining but then they allowed some movie shoot to have a set within the vicinity?
	I forget the details of that story.
	Do you remember that?
	That was at this exact time.
	Because Angela Marston, who was the owner of that restaurant, who brought that to light, because I was kind of going on my media tour, we did a lot of hits together talking about that in California.
	It was at the exact same time.
	And that was the hypocrisy.
	That was the absolute insanity.
	Yeah, if you were involved in Hollywood or in movie studios, no problem at all.
	They were still filming.
	They were still doing absolutely everything.
	Catering companies were on top of it.
	It was at that point that I said, okay, if all these people are trying to support us, what can we do to help?
	We actually started a fund to raise money for struggling and out-of-work restaurant workers.
	We wanted to raise $10,000.
	I was going to distribute it in $500 increments.
	I figured I could help 20 families by giving them $500 to help with Christmas gifts, keeping the lights on, perhaps paying part of rent going into the holidays.
	We ended up raising over $500,000.
	And I remember the money was coming in so fast, and we were trying to help so many people and so many businesses that, like Christmas Eve, I was driving around.
	We had just had a new baby.
	I was driving around.
	It was me, the newborn, my wife, and the kids paying landlords cash to pay people's rent because we had been raising money so quickly that we wanted to spend it and help people as quickly as possible.
	It was a 24-hour job.
	I mean, it was unbelievable.
	Plus, we had to vet these people out.
	Well, that's where no good deed goes unpunished and the road to hell is paved in good intentions.
	Some people might misappropriate some of the funds.
	Not you, rather, but people make false claims and you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to do your best and you can't vet everybody out.
	Practically speaking, what was the vetting process to make sure you're not giving money to those who might not truly need it?
	So my wife, we had the newborn.
	The baby was born October 21st.
	This is your fourth child, correct?
	This is our fourth child, correct.
	And the baby was born October 21st.
	And so my wife was home with the baby a lot.
	I was running a restaurant.
	So what she would do is that she would wait for the baby to nap and she would call.
	We had an online form where you would fill out, you would tell us your story.
	And this went nationwide.
	So we were helping people in New York.
	We were helping people in all different states.
	And those were the most restrictive.
	We obviously gave.
	We gave preference to the local restaurants.
	Lauren would call all of their employers.
	She would call their references and their employers, and she would hear their story.
	Hundreds of people.
	For example, in one case, she called one of the employers, and the employer starts crying to Lauren.
	She's like, not only am I losing this employee, I'm going to lose all of my employees.
	We're going to shut everything down.
	We said, how many employees?
	It was 13 employees.
	We wrote $13,000 in checks to 13 of her employees.
	She laid them off.
	She ended up hiring them back, and we did a huge thing with Lester Holt on the whole restaurant.
	So everybody was able to take six weeks off because of the money we gave them, and then she hired them all back and got really busy in February, and nobody lost their job, and her business ended up thriving.
	We've since stayed in touch with her.
	We actually ended up with our new restaurant.
	We had an employee came, and she was like, oh, you don't know this, but you guys gave me money two and a half years ago.
	And then she ended up coming and working for us.
	So it was like all of these stories.
	I want to say we ended up, it was $500 plus thousand dollars that we raised.
	We were giving away $500 to $1,000.
	So just imagine how much time that was, vetting people out, getting to know people, hearing their stories, and then ultimately delivering them the cash or the funds.
	It's not something most people would do, especially since even when you're doing something like that, there's no shortage of accusations you're going to face while doing it.
	And set aside the risks.
	Now, something you said on another podcast, and we've also seen it here, is that even after, set aside the devastating impact of these idiotic, unscientific policies from the get-go, even once all of these restrictions were starting to be lifted, people could go back to work, but they're simultaneously getting paid by the government to sit at home.
	In Canada, I just noticed all the restaurants were not able to, not all, a lot of restaurants were not opening or had these wonky business hours.
	And I was asking all them, what's the deal?
	And they say, we literally cannot find staff because people are getting paid $2,000 a month.
	They don't want to go and work for $2,500.
	a month.
	And I understand that you had that similar, you noticed that similar phenomenon in California as well, where people were just, even when they could, were not coming back to work because the benefits for not coming back to work were almost just as good as working.
	Now, mind you, we didn't have that issue personally because we ended up...
	We're treating everybody and keeping them in the family, if you will.
	But yeah, most restaurants had that issue and they couldn't open because they were making so much money either on unemployment or they weren't able to...
	Wild care was an issue, right?
	There were so many different facets to this.
	I wouldn't necessarily say it was one particular bullet, but definitely the fact that people were getting paid to stay home.
	And now, see, the anti-Newson rant goes viral.
	Is that what really launches you to the public eye on social media?
	Or had you already attained a certain notoriety before that?
	I mean, I had a notoriety as being like a Food Network guy, right?
	So I was in contract with Food Network.
	I judged multiple shows on Food Network.
	Food Network U.S., Food Network Canada.
	I had my own show on FYI Network when A&E bought out History Channel.
	Then I went back to Food Network.
	I had some C-grade television experience, if you will.
	I host an AM 830 radio show out here.
	There was a little bit of knowledge, but this was a whole other level of attention.
	To speak to that attention, I should mention here that 11 days after I went on that anti-Newson rant, Every single business that my name is attached to got served a labor audit by the labor commissioner of California, which wrapped us up in over $65,000 in legal fees fighting it.
	They sent a letter to every employee I had for four years asking if we ever missed a paid break, anything.
	Our attorneys couldn't find any trigger on what was driving this.
	They had no kind of...
	Smoking gun or specific case to point to in which they wanted to do this audit.
	It was clearly political.
	And it was on some of my LLCs that were just single member LLCs that I use as shell companies, but they did employee audits.
	So they audited our records.
	They did subpoenas on my wife.
	This went on for like seven months after.
	Guess when we stopped hearing anything from the labor commissioner?
	I was going to say when you said you love Big Brother, but I don't think you ever said that yet.
	No, I have no idea when.
	When the Newsom recall was approved, we never heard a word back.
	It was a coincidence, Andrew, much like Matt Taibbi being visited by the IRS as he's testifying before Congress.
	That's incredible.
	So this is like sort of an audit investigation into all of your employees to make sure that you're compliant with California regulations.
	Yep.
	There was no complaint.
	It wasn't like we didn't file our 941 and that triggered an audit.
	There was nothing triggering this because we'd always been compliant.
	We had a large corporate human resources department.
	Like there was nothing on paper that said, oh, because of X, we're now doing this audit.
	When you got vocal, actually, I do want to ask you a few questions about the Food Network television stuff.
	But did that – did those – Did opportunities take a dive?
	Did they fizzle out after you got vocal and were deemed to be part of the fringe minority with unacceptable views?
	Oh, 100%.
	They won't touch me with a 10-foot pole anymore.
	No.
	I've never had any of that.
	I got dropped from boards that I was on within the restaurant industry on a grand scale.
	I don't want to name names, but yeah, I was totally blacklisted.
	Basically very, very angry because it's a betrayal that's beyond any logic.
	It's a betrayal that's beyond any description.
	I've been a loner.
	I haven't experienced this, but I know people.
	You immediately get blacklisted, if not by businesses, by friends.
	How have you internalized that?
	How has that not made you angry at the world around you?
	Or has it, I should ask?
	Well, I mean, honestly, in the beginning, emotionally, it was kind of difficult to try and figure out how to deal with all this because it was so rapid and everything was happening so quickly.
	And then the emotion of still trying to run our own restaurant and still trying to maintain success and then have four kids, newborn, COVID, all these changes.
	I mean, it was like everything was just so incredibly overwhelming.
	But plus the fund, right?
	Like what was started as a $10,000 fund, now we have $500,000 that we're distributing.
	By the way, we ended up distributing more than that because we kept running the fund through the restaurant.
	So we started doing a percentage of sales from the restaurant as well to keep the fund going.
	So for me, eventually I did get angry, but it wasn't anger.
	It was just like these people, okay, well, good to know now.
	Right?
	Like, I'm glad to know that this is the way in which they operate, and I don't want anything to do with it.
	Okay, let me just think if there's anything.
	I've got some questions.
	What we might do is end this on Rumble, and just if you have time, just a few, maybe 10 minutes of questions on locals.
	Three questions here.
	You are what you eat from Bar Bisa Ariane.
	Super chat suck.
	This is from Seize the Day, and organics are deaf.
	What are you doing now?
	First of all, net positive, not just financially, spiritually, business-wise, has it been a net positive?
	Is it still a struggle on a day-to-day basis to fight back against these forces that are pushing back on you for pushing back on them?
	Well, it's always a struggle, right?
	So now we're just in the long, cold war of doing this, if you believe in a certain kind of framework of thought.
	We sold Slapfish, so we actually ended up selling to that larger partner.
	And I won't get into the details of that, although you can kind of read between the lines on some of it.
	And we said, okay, well, we're just going to focus on one restaurant now.
	We actually were going to travel around for a while and just not do anything and kind of lean into the media piece of this.
	But we had an opportunity to open a beautiful restaurant right on the water here in Huntington Beach.
	So we do have one restaurant now where we're using that as the vehicle through which we can continue doing good.
	Using the restaurant, using food as the great unifier.
	And for me, personally, you know, it's about just engaging with more people.
	Food is the great unifier.
	And I think you can understand conversations about politics and life by way of food as we talk about anybody who reads and understands the story of the kind of Amish milk farmers or any of these.
	And we say, do you really want more government in your life?
	Like when you use food as the means by which you have those real everyday conversations, I think it's a great way to get people to kind of open their eyes to what works and what doesn't work.
	So I always talk about food as being that conduit to do so, and that's what I'm focusing on right now.
	But now some people are going to look at you and say that you're not learning from your mistakes by getting back into business in Huntington.
	Now, Huntington Beach, I don't know about the politics of the county.
	Huntington Beach is where Tito Ortiz is from, right?
	He's the Huntington Beach bad boy?
	Okay.
	So, I mean, somebody was going to say you're now doing business with the same devil that has been abusing you for the last little while.
	Do you need to stay in California?
	Are you thinking about leaving and maybe taking your business elsewhere, to Texas or to Florida?
	I mean, somebody's got to fight the fight on the front line.
	And Huntington Beach is relatively conservative from a regulatory perspective.
	And I work with city council.
	I know them.
	It's a great city council.
	Orange County is also somewhat reasonably minded.
	It's a beautiful place.
	And we've got roots here, right?
	So why run away?
	You're going to run into this anywhere.
	I mean, it's not to say that all of Texas is conservative.
	We've seen what's happened in Texas, or Florida for that matter, right?
	There's good areas and there's bad areas.
	I'm sure that I could go put myself in an echo chamber, but I would much rather change people's minds.
	I would much rather fight the fight, show everybody what we've got going on.
	We give up California.
	Everybody thinks California is crazy, crazy left.
	I think there's 6% to 8% in the center here that could totally flip California.
	When you walk around the streets of California and talk to people, most people are not as crazy.
	It's just the crazy ones are the loudest ones.
	It's not like that, though.
	That much I have certainly noticed if social media has taught us anything.
	Now, hold on.
	What's the restaurant called?
	Calico Fish House.
	So calico is a seafood species off the coast of California.
	That's a real resilient species.
	It's a beautiful fish.
	And we thought it represented kind of our business model well.
	And then also the name Calico is pretty cool.
	Fantastic.
	And now, Chef, do you have another 10 minutes to spare?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Okay, what we're going to do here, we're going to go to local.
	So I'm going to end this on Rumble.
	It's not going to change anything from our end.
	And we're going to take the local's exclusive questions because there's a ton of questions and they're good.
	They're not necessarily juicy politically.
	They might be juicy.
	Food-wise.
	So I'm going to end the stream on Rumble.
	Come on over to vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Actually, I should give everybody that link.
	Oh, no, no.
	What did I just do here?
	Refresh this.
	And we've got some good questions there.
	So give me two seconds just to figure this logistically out here.
	And Chef, link is coming, everybody, here.
	So this is the link.
	Link to Locals.
	Boom shakalaka.
	And people, I mean, you've done amazing stuff.
	And I say for all the shit that everyone's been through for the last little while.
	We've gotten to meet not interesting people, but truly good people.
	People you might not agree with on everything, but you agree with them on the substantive things, which are the most important.
	And so for the friends that I'm sure all of us have lost, and the business that all of us have lost, or some of us, we've made it back in other respects.
	So, Chef, we're going to continue this on Locals, but there's a good crowd there, and I'm going to get to some of the questions.
	So ending on Rumble now, and it changes nothing from our end.
	And we're ending.
	Okay, good.
	Now, here are some of the questions, Chef, that are both culinary and political.
	Peak Mediocrity says, what does he think of people who like their steak well done?
	What if it's filet mignon?
	Now, this is a joke of a question, but it's sort of humorous.
	But I think that there is actually now that you started getting into like how to cut meat.

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