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Sept. 12, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
58:01
Papa John's Recipe for Success in America | The TRUTH Podcast #37
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Time Text
The good news is they've spent over $30 million investigating me.
My own board.
So they're taping you without your knowledge.
Unbelievable.
The left's ideology lowers the standard of living.
They function like morons.
Don't let anybody hold you back.
Amen.
Just do it.
Presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican running for president.
We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.
Let's talk truth.
Welcome to Columbus, Ohio.
This is an honor.
I'm joined by a guy I've actually looked up to for a long time.
I've been seeing you on TV for a lot longer than you've been seeing me on TV. Papa John, the founder of Papa John's, probably the best pizza chain on the planet, who I've enjoyed getting to know from afar.
I've been looking forward to this today for a long time, and we're here to have an open and honest conversation.
So, welcome to our podcast.
Well, you're mighty kind.
Thanks for having me, and it's a real honor.
So, we're going to get into what I think a lot of people, including me, are really interested in.
Deep dive of what happened back in 2018 and what we can learn from it.
But we'll get to that in a sec.
You're the American Dream Story.
I want you to tell your story so other people know about it.
How did you grow up and what got you to start what is probably the most successful pizza chain of our lifetime?
I'd say our number one key to success was we just had a great team.
We were really good at getting the right people on the bus and getting them in the right seat and getting them rolling all in the same direction.
And we understood the concept of momentum.
Once you have momentum, you want to hold on to it for dear life.
We had two fundamental principles early on.
Make a great product, superior, authentic Papa John pizza, and take care of your people.
Last year I was there in 16 or 17, I think our bonus to our employees was $34 million.
Really?
So they felt like owners.
And you owned 100% of the company?
We went public in 93. I had about 90% of the company.
Economically and voting?
And voting, yeah.
Okay, good.
We didn't have preferred shares at the time.
And then when public, I had about 75%.
And then when I got out in...
In 2017, 18, I had about a third.
Okay.
And if we just rewind the clock a little bit before then, how old were you?
Tell me your story a little bit.
What got you to start Papa John's?
What was the inspiration?
What brought you to that doorstep?
You know, I was kind of an entrepreneur and didn't know it.
Yeah.
Cut grass, painted gutters, painted shutters, did a litany of things on the side.
In Kentucky?
In Kentucky, Indiana.
It's on the border.
It's on the Ohio River, so it's one and the same.
Nice.
And then drove a forklift, cut right lickers, welded barges at Jeff Boat.
And then I got this gig washing dishes at Rocky Sub Pub.
I was 15 and I had to have a permission slip from the parents to wash dishes.
And I hated washing dishes.
And right across from where I washed dishes was where Frank Fondrisi made pizzas.
And unless you were a Fondrisi, Joe, John, or Frank Fondrisi, you had to wash dishes.
You couldn't make pizzas.
And so they finally got it right up in the scene.
They blew the doors off of it.
And the next thing you know, I graduated from washing dishes to making pizza, so it was a real honor.
And at Cutray Liquors, we'd buy a case of beer for $9 and sell it for $9.40, $0.40 gross profit.
At Rocky's, we'd sell a pizza for $9 and they have $3 in it.
So the economics of pizza early on intrigued me.
Plus, I love making pizza.
I love making the dough.
But you paid attention to those economics early on.
You sort of smelled that opportunity, actually.
I just thought, how can you make money on 40 cents growth problems?
Makes good sense to me, yeah, to ask that question.
So you had a knack early on, I got you.
Yeah, analytically, I was pretty skillful.
But with that being said, let's fast forward to Mick's Lounge, where we're $64,000 in bankruptcy, and we do a lunch special, Mick Burger and a Beer for a Dollar.
We're blowing the doors off of it.
Across the street is Jerry's Restaurant, which is kind of a dirty Denny's.
Charlie Moore owns it.
I've destroyed his business at lunch.
He comes over and says, John, I need to talk to you.
I said, hey, let me get through the lunch rush here.
He comes in at 1.30 and says, what's going on?
I said, we're doing a McBurger and a beer for a dollar.
He said, what's your food cost?
Hell, in college they don't teach you food costs.
I had no idea.
So we looked it up.
We had about $1.25, $1.30 in a McBurger and a beer.
So we weren't quite as savvy, maybe intuitively, but specificity, probably not as much so.
Okay, now you can pick up over time.
Yeah, we learned that over time, the food cost and labor cost, yeah.
And so you started it when?
Well, we were bankrupt in the bar in 83, Labor Day weekend of 83, and then we started the broom closet April 11th of 84, and then built the first Papa John's April 11th of 85, one year to the day.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Born in the same year as your daughter and I, I think.
Wow.
86. I was 85. Yeah.
So that's good.
And so you got your first one off the ground.
Got the first one off the ground.
Where was it?
Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Is that one still open?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Still does well.
Yeah, there's over 5,000 of them.
I know.
Yeah.
They're like cow patties.
They're all over the place.
A bunch where I grew up.
Yeah.
There you go.
But, you know, to answer your question is, I love making pizzas.
Mm-hmm.
And I was pretty good running the business.
And so when I talk to young entrepreneurs, it's just find something you love to do.
Find something you're good at it.
And as you all know, if you work it to the bone, sooner or later you'll beat the other guy.
They'll get complacent.
They'll get lazy.
They'll get lethargic.
And you just come in and you take their market share or you take their business.
And that's what you did.
That's what we did.
So Pizza Hut was probably the big competitor at the time when you took the scene, when you started to expand, or what was the market like?
Well, Domino's, Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars all started about in the mid-60s.
So they were all, you know, 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 stores.
So nobody thought a fourth player could come in a category because, you know, if you take Colitz, Coke, or Pepsi, you know, if you take beers, unless you flank it with an international beer, You know, there's two brands.
So it was Domino's and Little Caesars at the time.
Caesars had price, $5 a pie.
Domino's had speed.
They were fast.
And pizza had the buffet bar.
They were variety.
So at the time, 45-50% of the market share was independent pizzerias.
So we thought, what if you build a chain out of quality?
So we flanked them on the differentiation with quality.
Better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John's.
There you go.
That was actually a great slogan.
It stuck with me.
There's a story behind that too, but yeah.
Yeah.
And what were specifically the elements of quality that made the better pizza?
Everything in pizza that's better costs more money.
Everybody wants to own quality, but quality always takes time and costs more money.
So in our business, the protein in the flour, the gluten is the more protein, the more money, but the better the pizza.
Fresh packed sauce versus paste, twice the money, but much better on the flavor profiles.
Real mozzarella cheese, real meats, real veggies, the right box.
Seems like the sauce is also different.
Yeah, the sauce is way different.
The sauce is double.
You can buy a bag-in-the-box sauce for $10 a case, and you can buy a fresh pack for $22.
So it's substantially more to own up to the authenticity of better ingredients, better pizza, but we think people can tell the difference.
And how much did that eat into the margin that you were initially thinking?
Because that was part of the appeal, but then if you're playing quality...
How did you think about that trade-off for yourself?
Well, I think, you know, I'm conservative by nature.
And like I would build these distribution centers with dough machines, mixers, etc.
In my mind, I would think, okay, one day my grandson is going to see this warehouse.
He's going to see this manufacturing.
And I want him to get my mind on how I build it because I want him to be proud 10, 20, 30 years down the road that When I did something, it lasted.
And so the mindset was always longevity.
And I think that's where public companies get in trouble is they're chasing those quarterly earnings because they're chasing that stock price because they have options.
And that's the wrong mindset.
And they may be long gone as executives by the time they pay the price for that.
I think 80% of the companies that were Fortune 500 25 years ago are debunk.
They're on their business.
80%.
GE is not bunk, but it's a hollowed-out husk of what it was because of the same mentality.
If you have a normal company, a normal corporation with a normal board that's just doing business as normal, you're set up for failure long-term.
It's the wrong mindset.
Say what you mean by normal.
There.
I know what I think and I agree with you, but people are going to think on the consensus.
People are going to just, you know, do what's right for them in the short run.
The concept is, okay, if the average person is $35,000 in debt on credit cards and the average person is $40,000 behind on student debt, and we can talk about diet, we can talk about weight, You don't want to be normal.
That's right.
You want to be abnormal.
So a normal corporate board that has so-called professional board members, which usually are lifetimers, that are just normal corporate governance, if you really track it, it's a loser.
That speaks to me.
It's funny, even in this campaign, there's a trend in this country now, even in our party, say, let's just, we want normalcy.
Yeah.
I know what they mean, right?
Because our culture has gone in such a direction.
One of the things I often say in this campaign is, as Americans, we don't aspire to normalcy.
We aspire to excellence.
And I think, whether in business or in politics, that is an interesting choice to face, right?
If you're in disarray, normalcy sounds good, but...
We should aspire to more than that.
Let me ask you, did your grandson ever...
You have grandsons?
Yes, two.
And have they ever seen the shop you imagined?
Well, one's eight.
Okay.
And then one's four and a half.
Okay.
So they're not quite up for it yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Maybe in a few years.
But they've been in the pizza shops.
They've seen us make pizzas, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's interesting to use the word...
First, I was wondering where you're going with that.
You said, I'm a conservative.
And then you tell me about your philosophy of thinking for longevity, but...
It's even in the heart of the word, conserve, right?
You wish to conserve the thing you created.
The Papa John story debunks the left's ideology on every front, every single front.
You know, no assistance, self-made, product quality, took care of our people, did it by the book, did it for the long haul.
We debunked that.
Would you say you were right-leaning much of the time?
Well, we built the company on conservative principles.
Not politically, but just they work.
Classical cultural principles.
I mean, the left's ideology lowers the standard of living.
Of course it does.
For everybody.
I mean, the quality of life goes down when you buy into that ideology.
Look at the agencies, as you call the fourth arm of government.
I mean, they function like morons.
They do.
It's anti-emeridocratic.
CDC, I mean, people are going to be dying from the side effects of COVID because they weren't open and honest about the side effects and the potency of the drug.
FDA, the food supply is poisonous.
It's going to make you sick.
So, you know, when the left gets a hold of things, and so we built Papa John's on conservative principles and stayed basically out of politics.
We did a couple fundraisers and this, that, and the other.
But it doesn't matter.
If you do not buy into the left's ideology, and if you're not one of their cronies, they're going to find a way.
They will come for you.
And it's demonic.
It's satanic.
And that's the problem.
A regular American, and I'm talking about the Democrat elite here, most Americans that are Democrat, they're like you and I. They want the best for their family.
They wake up.
They try to make a living.
They want a bright future.
They don't know the lengths of the elite left.
No regard for humanity.
No regard for the betterment of our fellow man.
I mean, the border alone.
The suffering.
The child trafficking.
They're doing this right in front of us.
It's just a total regard for us and humanity as people, as loving people.
And so we at Papa John's were on the TV over, you know, eight minutes.
We're doing $4 billion a year.
We're making $200 million in EBITDA. And we're just a huge target because we didn't...
When was this?
This is by when were you doing $4 billion a year?
We're doing $4 billion by 16, 17. Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, it's a big company.
Over 5,000 stores.
EBITDA was $200 million a year.
Pre-tax profit was $165 million a year.
So we're making $3 million a week, $4 million a week.
It was a good ride.
Yeah, and trades at what?
10 times?
I took over in 2009. I came back in 2009. I've left three times.
All three times, they mess it up.
Yeah, it's funny.
Tell me about that.
That's kind of interesting.
We'll take 2009. October of 2008, beginning of 2009, the stock was $680 a share.
When I got off the bus, third quarter of 2016, it was $88.
So the company...
Why did you...
You just decided to move on to other pursuits in life?
I mean, most people make hundreds of millions to try to make hundreds of millions or more.
Yeah.
I saw your network.
And they're somewhat at parity.
And the question is, I made hundreds of millions so I could enjoy that little girl over there.
And my family, my friends.
I have aircraft.
I don't have a yacht because I think it's a waste of money.
I agree with you.
But I enjoy my life, and we'll tell you the irony here.
I'll talk out of both sides of my mouth.
When I was 21, I knew I wanted to make pizzas, and I knew I wanted to run the business.
Here I am, 61. I don't know.
I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do next.
I have four criteria.
Okay.
What are they?
I'm actually interested in this.
It's got to be authentic.
Yep.
It's got to be truthful.
It's got to be real.
And if it's not substantive and stands the litmus test of truth, I don't want anything to do with it.
Two is it's got a better humanity.
I don't really want to do anything with alcohol or tobacco or the processed food bothers me a little bit, you know, a lot of it.
I think they're for sale.
I think they're all prostitutes.
All the government is prostitutes.
No, but USDA is pretty bad.
You would know it.
So better is humanity, authentic.
Three is it's got to be scalable.
Okay.
You're not running for the president of the Moose Club.
You want to be president of the United States.
You want to be...
Life is short.
We have an impact.
I love that.
And the fourth is you don't want to have to feed it.
And the reason I say that, it's not because profit, I think profit's a very good word.
It's not that profit's the main thing.
But when I get involved with something, I always make it better.
Well, if I'm making profits, I don't have the resources to make it better.
Because if I'm doing something, I don't care if it's making whatever it's making.
I'm going to do that plus twofold.
Don't have to feed it means it generates profit.
It generates cash flow.
Absolutely.
And I haven't decided what that is.
Spiritually, the work I do says be patient but opportunistic.
So I'm an entrepreneur.
I'm allergic to patients.
I mean, I've got the attention span of a strobe light.
So I'm sitting here for three years waiting for it.
I mean, you did five drugs.
You did the biology thing.
And then now all of a sudden you're running for president.
So you kind of jumped into the next gig.
And then you follow it.
Say what?
You have an itch, you follow it, is my view.
You have passion, you follow your passion.
And I'm sure it will strike for you, too.
So anyway, you thought you were graduating from Papa John's pizza chain many times, and then you come back and you had to save the thing and bring it back.
So you took it from $6 a share to, what did you say?
$6.80 to $88.
To $88.
I mean, 40 million shares, you're talking about a company that's worth...
Oh my gosh, $300 million that's worth $3.5 billion.
So that was about $3 billion market cap when you had $16, $17 when you left.
I think it was $3, $2 or $3, $4.
And I had a third of that.
So it was a good ride.
Yeah, that's great.
And you know, if I went back in, which I'm a little worried about.
They might pull you back.
Well, I'm not sure I could do it with this labor market.
You know, when people are not going to show up.
You know, it's interesting, right?
This is...
So this is one of the things I'm very focused on as president.
But I think if somebody's able to crack the code of how to actually do this now, boy, is the payout going to be big.
Because we have more, as you well know, we have way more jobs than we have people.
So actually, this gets to the heart of...
I'm not doing this right now, but it's an opportunity that I see hiding in plain sight, right?
Imagine if you were able to create a workplace that defected from the orthodoxies that leave other people uninspired to say that this is a worthy mission, this is why we're here.
And even if you're able to fill the open roles a little bit more than your competitors, that's the rate limiter to success right now.
I don't know if you can go back to Papa John's and actually bring that same mentality back.
I would imagine that's a big competitive advantage.
Well, you know what you got to do is you got to find somebody.
Even on the darkest night, there's always one star out there that you can see.
So there's a Chick-fil-A or a Texas Roadhouse.
I was down in Nashville at the Gaylord, and it was unbelievable the job that the hotel did.
So there are a few people out there that have got this figured out.
But yeah, I think you have a competitive advantage.
If you can motivate the workforce, if you can get them to show up and then show up on time.
But that's, I mean, the payoff would be huge.
And that's all about culture.
And, you know, when I was reading your book on the woke and how some of the employees were giving you pushback on BLM and Antigua, I found that fascinating.
And I also found fascinating that you...
You like taking that part of that corporate bailout as far as the liability, limit the liability.
And if you're going to play the woke game, then you're going to have...
You pay the price for it.
And if you want to, you can, but you pay the price.
You read the book.
I think it's pretty ingenious.
Very few people, like people read the first chapter, that part gets a little bit wonky.
I'm glad you read it.
Yeah, the employees, I never did get to the part where, you know, what do you do about this Black Lives Matter?
Yeah.
That's obviously tearing up cities and being destructive with employees that want you to support that.
I love that.
I want to get you a signed book before we're out of here.
That's good.
So you lead this, what, $6.88, $88 a share.
We're talking 2016 now.
2017, 2018 was when the big, you know, sort of famous controversy came up.
July of 18. July of 18. So walk me into the lead up to that.
And I gotta admit, it's still hazy in my head.
It probably is hazy in a lot of people's heads who are watching this, so it'd be helpful, right?
Let's talk about 2017, 2018. I'm retiring in 16, informally.
I'm off, I resign.
As CEO. You formally resigned as CEO in 17. And we have a management team that was grooming pretty good, but things were slipping.
And things weren't going well.
The stock had gone from 88 down to, say, 68, or what it is.
After you stepped down in 16. Yeah, the quality definitely was going backwards.
The culture, we were the best place to work in Kentucky.
So the business was not unhealthy, but it wasn't doing what it was doing.
And so I was going to have to make some changes with the board.
I had two or three board members that really needed to go.
And then I had the CEO and a few other folks.
These were independent board members that were just kind of dead weight hanging around.
Didn't understand the business and just, you know, really didn't get what Papa John's was about.
You know, this is all about where the rubber meets the road, the product.
It's the food, stupid.
And, you know, if you don't have your mindset on, the store manager in that store has to be unbelievably talented.
We, the 5,000 stores, we had 600 that were corporate stores.
We didn't have a limit on expertise or knowledge or institutional knowledge or capital.
Our limitation was, you know, talent.
And so we only had 600, 650 stores because that's all we could manage.
But to be a manager at a Papa John's, you've got to have interpersonal skills with people, P&L responsibility, motivation, hard work, the fundamentals of making the pizza.
It's a very difficult job.
I mean, Even for you and I, now you would excel at this and you would grasp it quick, but it's not like for somebody that's the faint of heart.
And so my focus has always been not on 5,000 stores, but one store 5,000 times.
What do I mean by that?
Okay, what are the product quality...
What are the service times and what's that manager making?
When I left in 16, the average manager was making $84,000 a year.
42 in salary, 42 in bonus.
That means half are making 60 and half are making 100. Now remember, this is seven years ago.
You don't lose anybody when they feel like owners.
And then you've got, of course, the upward mobility with promotions.
Yeah.
It was just a different mindset.
I liked our nice steady growth and they were always looking for flavor of the month or something knee-jerk or you know is there something new on the I mean all these side things that had really nothing to do with the business and that's the one thing I found so insightful about your book is let's just make widgets.
Just make soft drinks if you're Coke.
Just provide entertainment and experience if you're Disney.
Stay as far away from all this other stuff Because it's the distraction from doing what you really need to be doing, which is the customer experience.
We call it demonstrable value, which is what the consumer perceives through its five senses.
And if you got that piece right, demonstrable value, sooner or later you'll have perceived value.
I mean, Chick-fil-A had demonstrable value way before they had perceived value.
And then once you get high DV, demonstrable value, high PV, then you can raise the price.
You have a premium brand.
Very interesting.
I like that mentality.
I kind of want to go back because this is just interesting to me on a lot of levels.
I mean, I've been in corporate America.
I understand how companies, you know, the company I founded is a, you know, it's a multi-billion dollar, nine billion dollar public company now.
And I understand the dynamics.
It had subsidiaries, spinoffs.
And then also in the government, I talk often about the existence of the managerial class.
And the managerial class doesn't just exist in the government.
It exists in universities.
It exists in corporate America and boardrooms.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what the dynamic was heading into the controversy?
I didn't realize you were actually making changes to the board and the management team.
That kind of affects the way that I think I'm seeing this story.
When you say they didn't understand the business, I mean, I'll just be honest with you.
One of the things that irritates the heck out of me is people who are professional board sitters.
They call it, do you sit on a board?
And it's such an interesting word to use because it does seem about right.
People sit around but aren't particularly...
they expect to show up at four meetings a year, clip a little paycheck, put it out, you know, join the local country club and talk about which boards they're on.
There's something about public company board culture that it can be done really well, but the normal way that it's done certainly irritates the heck out of me.
But I don't know what your experience was.
So I kind of want to hear it in a little bit more detail, if you don't mind.
Well, as much as we tried to educate the board on the business, They just didn't understand it.
They had no concept of what it's like to work a 14-hour...
So you're the CEO, though, and you own controlling shares of the company.
So we being controlling the board means...
You're the CEO, you're the controlling owner, but you've got all these other managerial nonsense hanging around, and then you're wasting your time.
Instead of focusing on making one store 5,000 times, you can make it one store 6,000 times.
You're here educating these people.
Well, you try to educate, and you write a book, and you show brick by brick why it went from $6 a share to $88.
It's book.
Page by page, brick by brick on how you fix it, and how you keep it fixed, and how you, you know, as they say, don't let the cow get back in the ditch.
And, but, you know, you have, if you're a public company, you have to have a professional board.
It's all optics.
And we, in our board, we had, we actually, out of our six board members, had three women.
So we were, and one was Latino.
So we covered all, you got to cover these.
I mean, I could care less.
Well, you know, you get attacked.
And to answer your question is, like right now you're under attack.
You feel it.
You're not stupid.
I knew in 16 and 17 when I was getting ready to change management and change that board, I knew I could feel something was going to happen.
And I remember driving around at UofL and I heard something on the radio.
I'm like, well, that's not what I, you know, that's not really what happened.
But it kind of didn't faze me.
And I thought, they're going to attack me, but it doesn't matter because they're going to have to make something up.
I really thought that way.
Okay, well, you know, if they're going to, if they're going to have to make it up.
And I thought, well, they can't really make it up.
Well, guess what?
They made it up.
I mean, I saw it coming.
I felt it coming.
So what was it exactly?
Now, let's refresh, if you don't mind.
Okay, I thought doing the deal with Mitt Romney, some of the things we did politically.
I was involved with Charles Koch and AFP. I thought it was the DNC. I thought that was where, in the liberal media, I thought we're all, I mean, we'd give $18 million to Purdue for a business school, and they'd write a negative article in my hometown.
I said, my gosh, I just gave them $18 million to talk about it.
In the state of Indiana.
Yeah, in the state of Indiana, and the local paper wrote a negative.
I mean, it's pretty blatant that they're kind of against you even when you're trying to do good.
I've learned slowly how this works, yeah.
The hard way.
And that's the thing we'll talk about Trump later is that the institutional knowledge that guy has by having to go through, because he went into the office and played nice.
He let Hillary off and he didn't, you know, he's not going to, you know, he's got institutional knowledge.
But anyway, back to the ranch here.
So I knew something was going to happen.
I did not know that the board, when we put in the CEO that was going to hire an agency, that actually set me up.
I mean, that's pretty...
An agency, like a hiring agency.
An agency to work on the PR. Whoa!
Oh, this gets...
Wait, wait, wait.
You've got to get into details with me.
So this is real drama here.
Oh, so you're looking to make changes on the board.
Yeah.
And then who on the board hires?
You've got to go a little walk me through this here.
Well, the CEO was groomed to be hired.
The CEO hires an agency.
The new CEO. You're still chairman of the board.
I'm still chairman of the board.
Still chairman of the board.
So the new CEO hires an agency.
What agency?
Laundry service.
That's what it's called?
Yes.
Casey Washington.
Is it called laundry service?
Laundry service.
Oh, my God.
It's Casey Washington.
Who wants to run for governor?
Yeah.
Okay.
So I didn't follow any of this.
Casey Wasserman's best friend is Roger Goodell.
Roger Goodell's communications guy is Joe Lockhart.
Joe Lockhart works for Obama and Clinton.
Nice.
The whole same mafia.
It's the whole same mafia.
To say, hey, let's get this ad agency.
Not to think about great ads for how we can ramp up our market share on pizza, which might be an interesting thing for an ad agency to think about.
Not that.
But to think about how to sync you.
They came aboard for good ads.
They produced not so good ads.
They were assigned to help perpetuate my reputation and to build a back.
And so that was the goal.
That was their job was to clear up the comments I made on the NFL conference call that stirred up all the controversy.
The press was, Snodder says he's against kneeling.
Snodder says he's against the players.
I didn't say anything like that.
I said it needs to be solved to the owner's and player's satisfaction, and that's Goodell's job.
That's the transcript.
So that got me...
So when was that?
It was in 17?
That was September...
No, that was November 1st of 17. November 1st of 17. And just so people refresh, because I know it's impressed in your brain, but people's memories are so short, including mine...
So that's what happened is you made a comment when the players are kneeling during the national anthem.
You said what?
No, I didn't say anything about kneeling, players kneeling.
All I said was our sales are down 20% because people are put off by the NFL. Oh, is it really in Papa John's?
Okay.
I'm saying, and I said...
Because you guys sponsor them.
Sponsored them.
That was 35% of our spend.
40% of our spend was on NFL. Okay, so you got 40% of your spend.
I told you, you gotta walk me through this.
It's down 20% in viewers.
All right.
And franchisees who are small business owners are bleeding.
So my comment is this needs to be resolved to the owners and players' satisfaction.
Roger Goodell is not doing his job.
That's all I said.
They blew that into kneeling.
That's what I'm saying, the left.
Oh, I see.
So Papa John's did nothing to correct the record, which is basically malpractice, PR. Self-sabotage.
Self-sabotage.
So we're fighting that January and February.
Business is going down.
So you think it did have a negative impact on the business then?
I think...
The PR did.
Oh yes, absolutely.
No doubt about that.
And the fact that Papa John's didn't correct the record, which, by the way, if I had the PR team then that I have today, this would never happen.
Because it's like, no, no, no.
Because you've got to get on this.
When they misquote you, you've got to get on this quick.
Because it'll just grow.
Totally.
And that's what happened.
So we're making changes.
So Laundry Service does a prep session, a training session, because I'm getting ready to go out and do some interviews.
Unbeknownst to me, they taped the conversation.
The whole conversation, they're trying to provoke me.
Laundry Service.
They're trying to provoke me.
But hired by the company.
Papa John.
So they're supposedly on your side.
That's all their old job was, is to...
Is to help deal with this fallout.
Fallout.
Temporary PR fallout.
It's the job of these firms if they have one.
But then they have a conversation with you.
It's unbeknownst to you that they're taping when you're Papa John and Papa John's is hired them and you're chairman of the board as an outside firm.
I mean, that just boggles my mind.
It's evil.
It's the managerial class gone wild.
That's all documented.
They're taping you without your knowledge.
Unbelievable.
You want the good news or the bad news?
I'll take the bad news.
Okay.
Bad news is they tape the conversation.
Yeah.
You know what's the good news?
Yeah.
They left the tape running.
And when they hung up the phone, they said, we're going to kill this MF. Are you kidding me?
They left the tape running.
So we had a hot mic.
So we got them.
They did what they did.
It's plain as day.
So what did they say when you were off?
They said, he'll be fired by Sunday.
We hope he effing gets sent out to pasture.
They literally used that word?
Yeah.
Okay.
Unbelievable.
So what did you say during that call that they wanted to hang you up?
They kept provoking and provoking.
Like, what were they saying?
What were you saying?
Just give me the...
Well, first question out of the box.
By the way, it was supposed to be a branding meeting, and the first question was, are you a racist?
The first question.
For a branding meeting.
I mean, it just was not right from the get-go, and I'm stumbling through this, and finally then I just get...
But I'm like, you guys, I don't know what you're fishing for here, but, you know, I'm a founder.
Colonel Sanders is a founder.
Colonel Sanders actually called because he's from Kentucky.
Black people, the N-word.
I never use that word.
I don't know where you're all coming up, you know.
And the problem is— That's all you said.
Is that actually true?
Yeah.
Oh, that's known.
We have people that will testify.
So use it as a comparison.
There's another business.
He's doing this.
What the heck are you doing to me?
Why are you asking me these questions?
But let's be straight with each other because it's going to be a long-term relationship here.
The comment was anti-racist.
Yeah.
I don't use that word.
The problem is I said the word.
No, you uttered the word.
The syllables.
The syllables.
That's where...
You made a noise that came out of your mouth.
Which referred to a word that you were not using in a derogatory way.
I always look at intent.
The intent was, I would never...
You know, this happened to a guy at Netflix, actually, too.
You familiar with that guy?
So he was working for, who's over the CEO, Reed Hastings.
And he's like one of his top guys.
And he was saying, in the meeting, about their own content, that we don't want this word uttered.
In the stuff we put out.
The thing he was saying is, in our content filters, make sure that they don't say the N-word.
And for him saying it in the context that they shouldn't say it in their content, he was canned.
And then I'm on The Breakfast Club, by the way.
I don't know if you saw that podcast I did.
You know, there's hosts, they happen to be black, they're kind of grilling me.
He's just using the N-word right with me on set, which is interesting, just this dichotomy we've created where it's sort of awkward, actually.
You're not using it in a derogatory way, you're talking about somebody else who was using it in a derogatory way, yet that got you in trouble.
It's sort of a weird...
Sort of a weird moment, right?
Yeah, and I think the key is...
Was that the main thing they wanted to hang you with?
Or was there something else they said?
I mean, I guess they couldn't...
The good news is they've spent over $30 million investigating me, my own board, you know, and...
Of shareholder money.
Well, I own a third of it.
Yes, exactly.
They spend a third of my money.
Your money investigating you.
This is as bad as it gets.
This is inhumane.
But, you know, life's not fair.
The universe always works for you.
It never works against you.
I think so.
I do not know why the Creator put me through this.
I thought I was humble.
I thought I was gracious.
I thought I was kind.
I thought I created a company with total integrity that was a great place to work.
But, obviously, I was missing something.
Now, I don't want to go through this again.
Um, but we, you know, we have to go, okay, there's something bigger and better out there.
Yeah.
And that we're all going to have adversity.
There's no difference of diversity that I challenge that I face.
Then, you know, everybody, uh, hardworking Americans, they have the same adversity issues.
Maybe it has a few more zeros on it.
Maybe it's, but we all have problems.
Now, if you just told me, John, by the way, um, A board of directors of Papa John's is going to hire a CEO who's going to hire an agency who's going to paint the face of the brand a racist.
I said, you're out of your mind.
There's no way.
There's no way that you take a chance on painting the founder and the face and the namesake of a company as a racist.
And that board and that CEO did that.
And so it's kind of crazy.
It is kind of crazy.
And yet...
You know, it's interesting, actually, the element of this story that I find fascinating, I think, is that there's a temptation to say that it was just the culture in this country, which was totally going nuts and haywire.
And, you know, I think this is one of the effects was Trump's 2016 election, which caused about one third of people in this country to suffer from psychiatric illness.
They start believing things they never otherwise would have believed.
And there's a cultural change going on in the country.
The left has become vitriolic with respect to its ability to want to put somebody's head in the spike.
But it's tempting to pin the story on that and just say you were a victim of it.
What I find more interesting is it actually is just a classic story of corporate boardroom drama where some people felt threatened.
They want to threaten back to you, and then they're just using that crazy culture as a tool of woke smoke to actually just accomplish a corporate coup that left them in charge.
That's actually what I found most fascinating about this.
Well, the most powerful emotion is love.
You know, if you look at Buddha or Christ and all the great, I mean, the parabola effect they have on energy versus hatred.
And the worst emotion is jealous and envy.
And I had 10 million shares.
That stock will go up two to four dollars a day, you know, here and there.
And I can imagine being an executive making five or six hundred thousand a year and a board member making two hundred thousand a year.
And in one day I make 30 million.
I can see the jealousy thing sitting in.
So, you know, I think that's a lesson learned that, you know, if I always felt like if you did the right thing and you operated with integrity and you ran a clean shop, you were safe.
This has made my awareness go up a lot.
You know, what's the saying that, you know, the Buddha master, if a guy steps up behind him and knocks him over the head with the ball bat, does he get back up and hit the guy?
And the answer is, the right Buddha has awareness to know the guy's coming behind him before he comes.
Yeah.
That's been a real good lesson on awareness.
Now, I'm not going to go through life being paranoid.
I'm not going, oh my God, this person is going to take advantage of me.
It's life too short.
But the awareness and the level of consciousness has definitely been a huge impact on trying to be a better person.
What would you do differently if you were to go through that situation again?
Um, I would have moved quicker.
I gave him too much time.
I followed...
I'm getting the CEO out.
You're too gracious.
The CEO evaluation is July 15th.
And that's when I let him go.
I was going to let him go.
I should have let the CMO go in September of 2017. I should have let Richie go, the CEO, January of 2018. And Shapiro and Libby currently should have been March of 2018. And we would have started with a clean slate.
If I didn't want this to happen, that's what I would have done differently.
I would have moved quicker because I tried to follow the process of being good corporate governance and doing things by the book.
And that just gave them time to undermine and to make things up and sabotage me with a fake story of being a racist.
And so what happened afterwards?
They kicked me out of my office on Sunday night, 11 o'clock.
Canceled all my agreements, my founders' agreements, chairman agreement.
They being a special independent committee of the board or something.
They didn't do that.
They did all this, and then Sunday at 8 o'clock, they decided to do a special committee meeting.
And the only thing the special committee did was to fire me and get rid of me.
That's not what a special committee does.
Delaware law, you've got to do an investigation.
They did an investigation.
If they'd done an investigation, they'd have had the tape.
We had the FBI, Louis Free, look at this.
They would have had the data.
They'd have had the background.
They did not do a proper investigation.
And they really are liable under Delaware law on not having an investigation.
But we did trips with these people.
These people didn't make millions.
They made tens of millions of dollars.
We never had any lawsuits with Sorbanes, Oxy, nothing.
We were best placed to work for five years.
Stock went from $6 to $88.
Not one board member, when this went down, called and said, hey, by the way, man, we're sorry this is happening, but we're just trying to do our job.
Not one board member has called me since then.
Can you imagine 34 years of your life's work and you hire this board?
Wouldn't you think they'd have the decency to say, hey, can we have a cup of coffee?
Either you've got to go, John, or we've got to go.
But not one person has called and said, we're just really sorry you and your family and your loved ones have had to go through this.
Because it was hell there for the first year until I could get on top of it.
So, yeah, it's kind of...
It's a sad story, yeah.
Yeah, it's like, wow.
I mean, I've never had a curse word with this board.
I never had anything but a very collaborative, congenial...
And it wasn't any infighting, you know, because we were doing so well.
They didn't understand why we were doing well.
They were happy making money, sitting around cheering you on.
So you did not voluntarily step aside.
No.
They made you?
Yes.
Okay.
And then what happened then?
I didn't know what happened.
I was like, that's not what I said.
Yeah.
We didn't know at the time.
We didn't know there was a tape at the time.
And I was confused.
I'm like, there's no history of not treating everybody with respect and dignity.
There's no history of this kind of stuff.
Nobody, and I'm indebted.
To the black community.
Not one person has come forward and said, oh, by the way, I heard him do this, or I heard him say this.
When you're down and you're in the town square and they're throwing tomatoes, you figure 120,000 employees, you've got to figure one person is going to come forward and say, oh, yeah, he said this.
Not one person has betrayed me.
120,000 employees?
Please.
And not one, huh?
Not one person has come forward and said anything negative about me.
That's a feat of nature.
That has been gift number one, and gift number two is the tape.
This is how corrupt laundry service and Casey Washman is.
By the way, Casey Washman is on the airplane with Jeff Epstein.
I mean, they're friends.
They're on five legs.
Of course they are.
I mean, the shit these people...
Unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
And that was back to the people that wake up every day, whether Democrat or Republican.
They just want what's best for their family.
They don't understand how...
And you're getting ready to get the baptism by fire.
How evil the elite left...
The elite left, they want to lower the population.
Totally.
I mean, the border.
Afghanistan.
Afghanistan.
I mean, say Papa John's was worth $3 billion.
I mean, we just left $85 billion worth of equipment over there.
I mean, the list goes on.
The drugs.
The meth.
Fentanyl.
Fentanyl.
You name it.
But they just don't understand how demonic and evil that these people are.
And that's the problem.
I thought the last election, the mid-cycle, I thought the electorate will see inflation, and they didn't see it.
Now, this cycle, for some reason, this feels different.
What do you think?
I think it feels different.
But I think it's not going to...
I'm not a passive observer, right?
I'm in this to change it.
I think that part of the problem is...
Yeah, there was a stage for us to see the challenges that people like you and I both have gone through, not only as CEOs, but challenges that people face in our culture every day.
But at some point, we're going to have to start running to something, right, to our own vision.
And so much of the left, not most of the Democratic, not most Democrats living their lives in the United States of America, but what we're thinking about as the people who control the keys to the institutional left, They're foisting this ideology of race, gender, sexuality, and climate.
I think we need to talk more about the value of the individual.
Hard work, success, self-determination, family, nation, God.
Individual, family, nation, God beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate any day of the week, but...
I think in our movement, in the conservative movement, we've been too shy in talking about actual values of our own that we stand for.
So I think that's what we missed in the 2022 election, the mid-cycle election, is it was all about pointing out the failures of Biden, which are obvious.
Anybody can stare that in the face and see it.
But people need to satisfy our hunger for purpose and meaning and direction and identity to say, no, no, no.
This is what we stand for and we will not apologize for it.
So nobody's doing that.
I'm aiming to do that in this race.
I think it's why it's going well so far.
But I think we have an opportunity for it to be different.
I don't think it's going to happen automatically.
I think you're onto something huge.
Principles and values and natural law.
There's a system in place.
Yes.
Whether you like it or not, when you play games and you hide things, sooner or later, the system seems to kind of hold things together.
When you have your principles and values, mutual respect, integrity, collaborative alliances, win-wins, faith, family, when you have principles in place, when things go awry, you have something to lean back on.
I never really looked at myself as Papa John.
I just looked at myself as John.
That was kind of like Kid Rock, his name's Bobby.
Yeah.
He's really like Kid Rock, he's Bobby.
And so when this all went down, he didn't go, no longer Papa John.
That didn't even faze me because, you know, I'll tell you what, one thing I did do with principal, I went right back to my mom because my mom didn't like this.
My mom was hard.
My mom was tough.
And she did not like this.
I went back to my high school baseball coach.
And I said, let's level set here.
I said, what?
I have no idea.
Peyton and I talked right after this.
He said, what's up?
I go, I don't know, Peyton.
I said, just for right now, you need to stay the hell away from me until I get this figured out how in the hell they did this, because I didn't at the time know what happened.
But to go back and lean back on principles gives you so much strength to endure and versity that if you don't have your principles and values, sooner or later, when you go awry, you're going to be lost.
That's what's interesting.
That's what grounds you.
I mean, sometimes it's hard to see it through the fog of the present.
You were, you know, God put in front of you a great challenge.
You think you took something away from it yet?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's made me better.
What would you tell a young person today if you're giving them advice based on the other side of this experience and who you are today?
What do you want to tell somebody who's graduating from high school in this country?
Well, I'd tell them to vote for you for president.
I appreciate that.
I'd tell them, find something you love to do.
Find something you're good at.
I don't care if you're a dentist, engineer, biochemist.
Find what you do, find what you love, work it to the bone, and you'll make all the money in the world.
I mean, a lot of young people now lack that self-confidence that you had that led you to say, all right, well, I want to make the pizza.
It's a better business than the other thing I'm doing or had an opportunity to do.
Young people today, I think, lack a bit of that self-confidence.
How do we bring that back?
Well, first thing is you have great coaches.
You said you went back to your baseball coach.
That stuck with me.
I look at my elementary teachers, godfather in first grade.
Jennings in third grade teach me math.
The teachers I had and the schools I went to were exceptional.
Great coaches.
But the one thing you have to have is positive people around you.
I do not do well with negative people.
And unfortunately, these kids kind of ridicule each other and they pick on each other.
And you want people around you that are going to build you up and make you feel better.
So I think associate with the right people that have the right habits, that have the right values, and then just hope to God you can get a good coach and lead you the way.
But I think a lot of the negativity is we don't have a lot of role models to look up to.
And I think the negativity with social media and the constant badgering at each other and running each other down when you're young.
I mean, when people say things about you and I, we don't like it, but it's not going to keep us off our mission.
When you're 14 or 15 or 16 years old, you're malleable and you're going to be more prone to get down on yourself when other people are making fun of you, I think.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you say that.
I tend to agree with you.
You see this mentality now ingrained into the minds of younger kids to not only see yourself as a victim of just being bullied by the bigger kid in the class, but if you're a certain race or a gender or sexual orientation, you're oppressed.
And I think that we got to get past this mentality where, you know, something bad happened to you, doesn't upset and ruin your whole, doesn't mess up your whole day.
It's like you stubbed your toe, right?
Somebody said something mean to you.
Okay, that doesn't mean that that person is in the right, but it bothers you about as much as you stub your toe walking around the kitchen.
And I think that that's something that we would do well to bring back.
The president's not going to do it on his own, right?
That's what I'm asking you.
It's going to depend on people like you to tell your stories, coaches to lift kids up.
But I do think that part of the crisis in this country right now...
Is actually a loss.
Sometimes I call it a loss of national pride, and it is.
But it's even deeper.
It's a loss of self-confidence itself.
And if we can muster and build back some of that self-confidence, especially among young people, that's part of how you grow an economy.
You have more people like you who are willing, confident enough to take the risks that you did to start a new business, to create things in the world that did not exist.
That's probably the single most important ingredient to reviving this country.
Well, you can't have mutual respect if you don't have self respect.
Yes.
You can't have self-respect if you don't have personal integrity.
If you're not solid with yourself, okay, your personality is what you think, how you feel, and how you act.
What you think, how you feel.
I mean, you can think positive, but if you feel negative and you act negative, I mean, you know, and so I think it all starts with the individual.
And that was the beautiful thing about what the framers did, is they understood common sense and they understood human nature, both good and bad.
And they understood free markets.
A majority of them were businessmen.
They were.
They really were.
So they understood everything from a business perspective.
So I think it starts with the individual.
I mean, I just don't know how I'm going to be strong for my friends and my family and my community if I'm not strong with myself.
Are you religious?
Very spiritual.
Very spiritual.
I mean, I think anything...
Is that part of what gives you your sense of strength or is it something else?
Well, it's the only hope I got to get my ego out of the way, you know?
I think...
Like you said, your baseball coach, does he play more of a role or would it be a religious figure, a priest, or a pastor?
Yeah.
No, I don't do the religious dogma thing.
But I'm really good at moving molecules and particles with molecules and particles.
You and I know how to get shit done.
When you're building 5,000 stores in a store day, you know what you're doing.
I like being in, I call it the quantum field, and get out of the three-dimensional field.
Really get in the quantum field and get the energy out of the quantum field to make better decisions.
On the three-dimensional field, you know, through our five senses.
But I definitely...
This is...
We've always been spiritual and always knew there was...
I mean, there is...
God is truth.
I think God is real is one of your principles.
God is real.
I believe that, yes.
I mean, every time I get myself, even sword in the gray, even if it's accidentally sword in the gray, I get...
smacked upside the head i don't understand how these democrats get away because what they do is they hire lawyers and they wear the other guys down with lawyers and they take you know things going for three four five six years but the stuff they do i mean the russian hoax uh the hunter biden cover-up uh all this money coming in from these four i mean you know we're talking not one or two years but some of this goes back to 13 and 14 10 years and
Yet they're able to prolong this being exposed to the public and get away with things that you and I have no chance of getting away with.
That's the reality, but the question is what are we going to do about it?
I think it goes back to that.
You pointed it out.
You can't have mutual respect if you don't have self-respect.
To have self-respect, we've got to know who we really are.
And to me, that's part of what, that's our opportunity right now.
Fill that hole.
And that's the opportunity I see you have.
I remember being, I was born in 61, you know, right after JFK was assassinated.
But before he passed, he put in the President's Fitness Award.
Yes.
100 sit-ups, 100 push-ups.
And that was the religion that you did in elementary school.
And I think you're the kind of person that can bring us together and I mean, you're athletic, you play tennis, you're fit, you're sharp, you've been successful.
I think what a role model to give everybody else in this country a special hour.
You use hope.
That's what I think you could do.
I appreciate that.
I mean, I think that whether it's me or somebody else, it's being done through us.
I'm running to be the next guy who does it.
I want the person who's in the White House to be somebody that you and I can look at our kids and say in good conscience, I want you to grow up and be like him.
Whoever that is.
And that can be part of bringing back our self-confidence as a country, too.
We need role models, not just presidents, but CEOs, entrepreneurs, coaches.
I think you can do this.
I appreciate it.
What's your advice to me before we wrap up?
I want to be selfish here.
Tell me.
Be strong and receive.
I love your principles, your values.
The Constitution is the greatest document for freedom.
I usually say there was five agencies because you had the agencies and you also had technology.
You had the big guys, the three governments.
But I think your principles and your values and the way you're going about it, And I think you're walking the talk.
I think that's the key thing.
If you walk the talk and you're truthful, I don't think, and you're going to have to have an arsenal around you because they're going to come after you.
Sure.
And you see DeSantis.
DeSantis, you know, who's a great governor.
I'm a president of Florida.
A great man.
I think he's a great governor.
He's a great governor.
A great man.
And very good friends.
But, I mean, he had no idea what he's getting himself into when he We stepped into that presidential race on a national basis.
So, you know, just walk the talk.
Keep being you.
And then you're going to have to hire...
This is not a knife fight.
This is a gunfight.
You show up with a slingshot or a knife, you're going to get your ass whooped.
You're going to have to come with a bazooka because these people are nasty.
They play to win.
They'll do anything they can to win at all costs.
And as long as you're ready for that, you know, truth will always win over lies and light will always outshine darkness.
Love will always outdo hate.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
I love it.
This got me going today.
You gave me my lift and win in my wings for today.
I appreciate that.
Well, thank you.
It's good to see you.
You've been a hero from afar.
This is a special gift and opportunity for me.
Well, you touched my daughter's heart.
She wanted this to happen.
Thank you.
I'm grateful.
I'm grateful that we did it.
I think this is just the beginning.
I have a feeling we're going to be allies for a long time to come.
And truthfully, I'm expecting to be in the White House for eight years, but the president alone is not going to drive our cultural revival.
It's going to take everybody, including people like you, to do your part, and I know you will.
And I cannot wait to see what that next adventure is.
I'm at the edge of my seat.
I'm excited.
Amen to that.
And let's go.
I want to see this 10% incentive.
We incentivize to do drugs.
We incentivize not to work.
And now you're incentivizing people to raise money.
I think it's beautiful.
Yeah, exactly.
It's beautiful.
You know, and the funny thing is the political consultant class, they're the ones who are, it's like the equivalent of these toxic ad agencies.
They're the ones actually collecting all the 10% of the money they raise.
I said, let everybody else do it.
Might as well democratize it.
That's my view.
So anyway, it's a lot of fun.
Thank you, John.
Thanks for having me.
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