Measurable Metrics For Success in the Kitchen, Structuring Your Business, and Finding Your Community with Justin Khanna

What is up everyone? This is Chris and you're listening to Chefs Without Restaurants, the show where I speak with culinary entrepreneurs and people working in the food and beverage industry outside of a traditional restaurant setting. I have a little extra life in me today. This is episode 200. And while I try not to get caught up in metrics, I think that's pretty cool. I can't believe I put out so many episodes. Obviously, I wouldn't be here today without the support of my listeners, my guests. So thank you all. Today I have a returning guest. It's Justin Khanna. We did a double episode A couple years ago. And then Justin came back for my what it means to be a chef episode. I'll tell you off the bat that this is a longer episode, I thought about breaking it up into two parts like I've done in the past. I know conventional podcast wisdom, and I'm using air quotes here would say that I need to either edit the hell out of the show or cut it into two. But if you know me, nothing about me has ever been conventional. We talked about so much good stuff in this episode, and I wanted to keep it all here in one place. We'll talk about Justin's hospitality education company repertoire. Measurable metrics for success in the kitchen, including working clean podcasting, including guest reach out workflow and working with PR agencies. We talked about being part of or even building your own community. This includes collaboration and being part of a scene or borrowing from Austin Kleon seniors. For the entrepreneurs, business owners potential business owners, we discuss the difference between having a lifestyle business or having an acquirable business and why if you have a partner, you need to make sure you're on the same wavelength here. I'm not gonna give any more away I want to just jump right in and episode. I do want to say I hope that you enjoyed listening to this as much as I enjoyed talking with Justin. Towards the end, we talked about some potential discussions for the future, we could have gone on for another couple of hours. So let us know what you want to hear us talk about next. Like I said, we throw out some options toward the end of the show. The best way is to reach out to either me or Justin or both of us via our social media links, which as always, are in the show notes. And I'm gonna let you know that the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast is going to take a little break. It's a much needed break. I really love doing the show, but it's been a lot. With everything else I have going on this summer. It's just been too much trying to get out an episode every week. Rest assured the show. We'll be back on Tuesday, September 5. I've already recorded a bunch of episodes including Bradley oni formerly of Bon appetit. Scott Blackwell from high wire distilling. And I have a bunch of other fantastic episodes. I'll be bringing you this upcoming season. And I might even have you on the show. Yes, you. If you think you have a great story to tell and some tactical advice for our listeners get in touch with me. The best way to do that is to send me an email at chefs without restaurants@gmail.com One last thing before I go, if you're enjoying the show, I would love a rating and review especially on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are great ways to help us grow allows me to get more guests sponsors and continue making these episodes for you. And speaking of sponsors. This week's episode is brought to you by the United States personal chef Association and hire chef. Are you a personal chef looking for support and growth opportunities? Look no further than the United States personal chef association with nearly 1000 members across the US and Canada. USPCA provides liability insurance certification lead generation and more. Consumers can trust that their meal experience is insured and supported by USPCA. And now for a limited time, save $75 on new membership and get your premiere listing on hire chef by using the code TaxBreak2023 at uspca.com Plus, if you have products or services to sell chefs and their clients showcase your business on hireachef and USPCA websites with our great introductory packages. To learn more about membership advertising or partnership opportunities, call Angela at 1-800-995-2138. Extension 705 or email aprather@uspca.com Well, you know we should just throw it right in and start talking because I think that's probably the best way. You have been on the show before. I think that episode I did was a double episode I was on your show. And you even did the little guest what is a chef thing for me so I'm sure if anyone's been listening to my show for any amount of time, they probably at least know of you. So I don't want to spend a ton of time going back and rehashing all that I'll link all that stuff up in the show notes as I usually do so people will get to know a little bit about Justin. So I guess the best places to start. What are you doing now career wise in the food world? Bring me up to speed because I guess our official last podcast was probably like two years ago and I know a lot has changed since then. So if someone were to say to you Hey Justin, what do you do you know, like you're at a party, which we all hate those questions anyway. Right?

Yeah. Chris, thanks for having me back. It's It's really an honor to speak to your audience because I think that there's so much Venn diagramming that happens between the folks that I speak with and your folks too. I've been out of restaurants. I was trying to do the math the other day, it's been six years, being out of restaurants at this point. And for the time, I think when you and I spoke last I was kind of in the thick of having an event production company. And so in 2018, I had I was doing pop ups all over Seattle. I was getting the venue's I was renting the table where I was talking to the clients, I was staffing, I was putting the ticket page live, I was doing the social media content, I was doing everything. And I had hired probably three, four, just kind of like contractors who were just in my orbit, who I would frequently call on when it was time to do a dinner, they had full time jobs. And it was just this thing where when I had something coming up, or if I had a client asked me to do something, I would, I would cook with them. And I had a event where I met this woman who had an event production company, but she wasn't a chef. And so her and I just started talking and there was so much great business partner dynamics that were happening. And so just to provide value to the audience here, how I navigated that time was following the advice of, you need to have your values align. So this woman, her name was Jade, I'll just call her by her name for going forward. Her and I really wanted to build like a positive culture, and not burn our employees out and not constantly have, you know, underpaid people either. Think there's a lot of places in private cheffing in catering in events, production, where it just becomes this like, show up with a black shirt. And you know, just take this tray and pass some canopies around. And don't worry about it if the client treats you like shit. And we really wanted to, you know, kind of get away from them. And consequently, we also really, to the business partner point, aligned on what she did well, and what I did well, and my weaknesses and her weaknesses. And so she could sell like nobody's business. And I could cook and creatively come up with ideas like nobody's business. And I loved operations, and she loved the kind of like big picture vision of where the company was going. So she was CEO, like, everything was was working COVID happened, I think like a lot of probably your listeners and US businesses as well. There's a YouTube video on my there's a huge video on the channel where we had just moved into a nine person office, this is in like, January ish of 2020, we were on track to do our first seven figure year as a company, we were finally getting to that place where we were, you know, starting to have some longevity. And our employees were like Jade and I weren't the ones who had to the events all the time. And so I had this grand vision that I was going to like, you know, scale up the content a little bit, but mostly just kind of like, start to turn this business into something that, you know, we would see the fruits of our labor basically COVID happened, we lost probably 85% of our contracts for the year, which was really disappointing. And that Jade, she she was engaged in living in Canada just kind of part time, but she married a Canadian. And so she was just up and across the border in Vancouver, which running an in person business is really hard when you when you have that long distance, you know, kind of relationship who if we're building software man would have been totally fine. Because we could have all worked remote, all the tools came out, we were in zoom life for such a long time. And it really would have worked if we were in any other industry. But as you know, it's like hospitality is difficult to do remote, we did make it work for a while doing cooking classes that, you know, is an important pin to, to put on the board here because it kind of relates to what I'm doing now. And yeah, it was really hard just trying to make sure that we were keeping our staff on payroll, just making sure that we didn't have to let anybody go, at least while things were in our control. And the benefit was we actually took a moment to almost think to go on the offensive, because a lot of us were like, and this isn't going to make it through to September. And so we were actually looking at pieces of commercial real estate in like may ish of 2020. Because we were like, we have cash reserves, you know, like all of our other competitors are going to kind of go out of business. And so we're going to take advantage of this and get a you know, physical brick and mortar space. That's going to be our production kitchen. And we're going to have our offices in there. And so just as a snapshot of you know, where I was at probably four, four ish, five ish years ago. And no, this was no. This was in 2020. This was three years ago. And so to kind of really put that all the way back. We ultimately had to wind it all the way down because it was like Jade really wanted to be in Canada. We ultimately and I feel comfortable talking about this now. We started to have some just overall head butting issues of where we wanted the company Need to go? And maybe this is a I'll call it a side tangent, but I really haven't put out a lot of content on this. So I'm comfortable talking about it here to this audience because a lot of there's there are a lot of business owners, right that listen to the show. Yeah. So I wish someone would have told me this, me and my business partner this really getting clear on do you want this to be a lifestyle business? Or do you want us to be in like acquirable business. So like, a lifestyle business is also this almost like this thing, like, you don't want to let it go. Because it's genuinely helping to feel your lifestyle, whether it's, oh, this allows me to host really lavish parties, or this gives me access to really incredible wine because like, I'm an importer, like, I have an in wine import business. And so I can just kind of like get access to some really cool bottles, while simultaneously like providing value to my customers and clients through the wine that I'm purchasing. Or you have to come to terms with do I want this to be sellable someday. And they're really at odds, like like Seth Godin talks about this, to a really large degree of just making sure that you can get your business to a place where said differently, nobody's going to buy a lifestyle business, especially if the founder, the owner, is the thing that they're the Rainmaker, everything in the business hinges on this person being here, this person being involved, this person being the one delivering the service, when you have, I think we had seven or eight or nine employees, like the peak of it. And when that happens, you start to do like company offsites. And you start to do these big whiteboarding sessions and you start to have these like, okay, the leadership team is going to talk to the rest of the, to the to the team. And we would get out of these meetings sometimes. And it would be this very, like, hoo, rah, rah, we're going to sell this thing. But then it was like behind the scenes, or when Jade and I would have one on one conversations, it would be like, Wouldn't it be so nice if we could just, you know, like, do take care of six clients a year and make whatever we need to make, and then just kind of like, do whatever we want for the rest of the time. And what I want to emphasize for folks listening is, it's not bad to want one or the other, there is no right or wrong answer. It is just, there's a little bit of you want to incorporate some integrity into whatever your statement is. So if you say you're going to try to get acquired someday, if you're going to try to exit, if you're going to try to make sure that someone decides Oh, it really makes sense for us to merge with this company. And this happens all the time with like, I remember when Amazon was starting to do like Amazon Fresh stuff here in Seattle, they were really starting to like gobble up all the commissary kitchens. And that's like a very real moment, when it's like, Oh, I've owned this Commissary Kitchen for seven years, I built it up to be this thing. And now all of a sudden, I have this offer from Amazon to potentially take all of these assets and you know, systems off my hands. And the same thing with a lifestyle business, there's so many people that are probably even listening to this now who are like, I love my private chef business. Because I get to travel, I get to cook, however I want, I get to decide when I work, I get to say no to people, I don't have to manage that much overhead. Like there's so many benefits to being lifestyle. But I think the the problem is, and the lesson that I'm hoping to convey here is like, don't talk out of both sides, your mouth with this stuff. It's like if you are lifestyle business, just say that and really lean into that. And you can look over at the other people on the other side of the fence who are in their acquired mode, or they're thinking about, you know, systematizing, everything becoming attractive to a buyer. And you can just wave over at them, you can see their green grass, and you can say, That's awesome for you. You know, I love that that's what you're doing. But we really, you know, struggled with kind of like writing both sides of the fence. And so to really kind of bring this home, after that event production moment, I really kind of took a step back. And I was like, Okay, what do I really like doing? What are all the kinds of pieces on the board? What's the biggest impact that I can potentially have? And ultimately, like, what what don't I want to be doing? I think that's a really, really valuable exercise. And now that we're in the middle of the year, and that there's I'm not a big believer in like January 1 stirs. You know, like, I think there's any good time to make a habit, but I was like, I really took a second to be like, what are the things that drain my energy? What are the things that don't feel good? If I really take a snapshot back and look at the past five years of what I've worked on, and the projects I've said yes to one of the things that if you even if you paid me double, triple what I say yes to that, and there's a lot of things that the answer was no. And so for me, where I really landed was was teaching. And so that was a really big turning point moment, because every single other thing fell into place. For me, it was like, Oh, well, if I had an educational product, then that would mean that I can could help the most amount of people in a really skilled way. I wouldn't be so reliant on sponsors, I can make content. To your point to what you and I do with the with both of our podcasts is like, have great conversations with great people to ultimately provide free value to potential customers for this thing that I know provides the most amount of good for folks. So I started a hospitality education company called repertoire and we made courses that help just kind of fill in those gaps and upskill people who are working in the industry, there's actually not a lot of recipes that we cover. It's it's mostly technical, it's mostly skill development. It's mostly these things that I find that most people get frustrated that don't get taught communication organization, how to set yourself up, how to navigate potentially getting a promotion, those things. And so the flagship course that I have is called Total Station nomination. And most folks have probably heard me talk about a concept called the dummy skills course, that was like, the original thesis of everything that I was going to try to put out there. And I was like, Oh, well, Dummy is the French word for half for those who don't know. And I was gonna say, Oh, well, I'll teach you the other half of those things that they don't teach you in culinary school. And I did two betas. They were cohorts. And people in the cohort started to say, Justin, I love all the content in this course. But I didn't go to culinary school. So I don't have this other half that you're talking about. So can you teach me that too. And so it all really started to kind of like come together and be like, in part of its imposter syndrome, right? So to the listener asking, Well, why don't you just call it a culinary school? Because it's like, I went to the big culinary school, I went to CIA, and I know what the campus looks like. And I know the number of staff that they have. And I know the fact that they give you chef whites in a new new set of knives. And I wasn't doing any of that I was just really stripping it all the way down to like, what are the real practical, tangible things that like, if you did the backdoor, show up with your knife roll thing tomorrow? What's chef gonna ask you to do what's required for you to jump on a station and run it effectively. And so that's really what I focus on. The real kind of day to day stuff is dealing with product development. So how can we get more tangible practical products into the hands of working professionals, and then making the content to help bring more people into the ecosystem in this kind of like, positive growth minded, you know, hospitality culture that I wish I had, when I was when I was starting, I think that there was a lot of like, Kitchen Confidential, there was a lot of like, shrouded Behind Mystery Of like, LBE for Ron Adria, r&d, you know, stuff. And I think so many other industries do it? Well, with just being welcoming, if you want to be a graphic designer, now, there's no shortage of liking go on Skillshare and take some great courses. I think the current landscape of what does free to remotely consumable content for the hospitality industry look like, I think it's a lot of like, oh, we'll take you through the six month culinary program. But it's like, we're gonna start with dicing and onion. And it's like, it's not like that's not valuable. But I think, to my point of, if you jumped into a kitchen tomorrow, it's like, I care about much more things. And it's bringing in a lot of stuff from from frustrations that I had with with hiring employees, too. So that's what I work on.

There's a lot to unpack there. And a lot of things I want to touch on. But you know, it does, it's like we are I like to teach techniques, not recipes, right. And the people that you're teaching, these are skills that work for them inside a restaurant, if they're aligned, cook or whatever. But I'm assuming they're also skills that if they want to leave and do something like we do full time, part time, because that is the hardest thing. You're aligned, cook in a restaurant, whatever you want to go be a private chef, personal chef, you may have never done any of the managerial stuff, you haven't done any of that you know how to line cook, but doing what we do is so much more than line cooking. And where do you learn those skills, if you're not in a management position in a kitchen?

Well, that's a huge takeaway that I also noticed that made me want to start this as a company, as opposed to having this just be a one off course. So I would have people who would join the dummy skills course back when that was the name of it. And they would take it and I would ask, because this was, you know, like a very beta version. I was like teaching on Zoom, basically. And I would ask people, you know, in the chat, where are you working? And what's your position? And I had some people who would say, Oh, well, I'm a, I'm a sous chef at XYZ place. And I was like, wait, you know how to run stations, you have kind of achieved a managerial position, but you're still taking this course about how to be productive as like a shutter party. And they would say, Yeah, because I'm really struggling as a first time manager. Nobody taught me how to, you know, like, give these frameworks to my life, because I know what worked for me. But it's like, There's this great quote, and I heard it the other day, it was an expert is a person who has a reliable system that works. And so it's drawing that distinction between experience and expertise. So, Chris, you and I have experience working in different kitchens and different stations, but it's like, are we experts at it? There's a lot of things that I you know, kind of like worked on and stations that I ran, where I wouldn't necessarily say that I have a framework that works. It's the it's the you don't want Michael Phelps to teach you how to swim effects. Because Michael Phelps is just like a genetic freak, you know, like, he jumps in the pool, and he's just like, of course, he's gonna swim faster than anybody. And that's a Tim Ferriss them of like when he wanted to learn how to swim, he sought out someone who like, was completely terrified of the water, who didn't know how to move their body and in any sort of swimming motion, who couldn't hold their breath. And that person learned how to swim. That's why I want to teach me how to swim. And so I try to take some of those same characteristics to what I build, because it's like, if you get into that management position, and all you have is your experience, it's like, what if you had a little bit of tools, frameworks, buildable skills and habits that you can pass along to the people that you're mentoring, instead of just this, like, figure it out culture that I think just is so prolific and toxic, and it burns people out, and it makes people frustrated. And that's where a lot of my, my building comes from, is just wanting to see more engaged, excited, people in hospitality, not this, like, you know, pissed off frustrated, you know, like, oh, well, there's, there's no good people, it's like, well, there might be no good people, because you burnt them out, you know, even at the

upper level, you know, and so many of these skills are job specific. I've talked before about my last job that I was at for 10 years, I came on as an executive chef, I had been a chef before I knew what I was doing. But everything at that company was different. I was coming from a catering company. And then I was working at a retirement community. And we had like four venues, it was a huge campus. And I still remember my first day on the job, my boss brings me over to my office, which is on the other side of the campus. So we're not sharing offices, and says to me, this is Marilyn, she's your assistant, we would call it like probably chef de cuisine. This is your office, call me if you have any issues and literally left, I had never been with the company. I didn't know this woman, this woman doesn't like me, because now she's got a new boss, right, who's half her age. And like, that's not setting me up for success. And I stumbled for months, if not, maybe even the first two years, you know, it was just expected that at that level, you're coming on to be an executive chef, you're going to know how to run the kitchen, which isn't fair, and it didn't set me up for success. And I made sure that I was going to not let that happen with people I brought in. I think it speaks to a lack of mentorship and a lot of these places to again, especially as you're higher up, you know, like, they just expect that you're going to hit the ground running like nobody has to a GM doesn't have time to spend time with you. To train you, you just have to start working. And that's tough. And it burns a lot of people out, I could have easily thrown in the towel. And like this is not for me.

I mean, take a look at any of these, the dozens now of restaurant meme pages, you will find some version of the guy talking about how he did it at his last job meme, because nobody wants to hear that in professional kitchens. And I think that's so funny. Because a lot of us go to these places because we want, I want the French Laundry experience, I want the Liberty and inexperience I want the techniques for millennia. And then you go to your next kitchen. And I think what my course really tries to teach is all of the things that are not the things that you bring to that next kitchen. So it's like, you go to an environment that teaches you about movement that teaches you about upgrading your output. So like you can do the more covers in the same amount of time, you can do the same amount of covers, and in less time. You can tackle tasks better, you can have more than one project going at the same time. It's like that's actually what you want to take to the next place. Because everything else, the way that they make their holidays, the way that they wash their herbs, the way that they season their sauces, the pots and pans that they use, all of that is going to be different. So it's like what is the stuff that genuinely comes with you from place to place to place? If I really had to sum it up, like, that's what I spend my time focusing on, is really getting to the heart of like, Oh, cool. There was this kitchen environment or this hotel or this catering company that what I teach didn't work for. Okay, cool. How can I back up and try, like, tweak the model? You know what I mean? Go go all the way back to try to figure out what is it about this that I can make as universal as I can. And so it really feels like I'm writing a book right now, man like it's, it's, I'm working on version three of the course. So first one was, you know, some slides built in Google Google Sheets and, and me on Zoom, Google Slides and me on Zoom teaching. The next upgrade was like we had we have a student community. There's like a workbook full of templates and resources. The slides are all updated and organized so much better. So there's actually a flow that you kind of like walk yourself through. And with this new upgrade. I have I'm kind of announcing this on your show. I haven't you know, gotten to a place where I really feel making my own piece of content on it. I have something called this He can score. And so it's across nine different variables. And you can test yourself on am I able to meet all of these variables with the current station I'm running. And I find that what that does is it's incredibly helpful from a put yourself in relation to something nests. I do a lot of strength training. I do a lot of I try to go to the gym probably three, four times a week. And what's really helpful for me is, if you put 225 pounds on a bar, it's very objective, can you benchpress that or not? And I found for myself really frustratingly, you look at a line cook? What how do we talk about line cooks? It's like, are they a good cook? Can they work clean? You know, like these very, like, arbitrary descriptors for how we evaluate performance. And I was like, what if there was some sort of objective metric that we could use, that's I've created all of them. And basically, the goal is, if you're on a station, and your station score is not where you want it to be. My goal is to help you improve that score over time, over time, over time, and you get support, you get coaching, you get all the frameworks that that that you can implement, through basically, habit building, it's not really like sexy, not going to tell you, Oh, well, you just need to, you know, like, hold your knife differently, or you need to set up your cutting board with a little wet towel underneath it, and then it won't slide around anymore. It's like it's none of those tactics. It's genuine habits. And to me, that's going to provide the most amount of good. So yeah, that's, that's, that's really kind of like the crux of what I'm hoping to build. And then from there, it's like, what other problems ail the industry? And how can I take a look at them? And really kind of like apply the same way of thinking to them? Of Why is it a problem? What is the current solution that's probably failing, and just do the work to kind of like, put a product out there, get feedback on it have industry people tell me, it's shit. And then it's like, go back to the drawing board, fix it again, you know, and that's where I really thrive. And I think, again, pulling in a couple of the other things that I've like, I got good at content production. And then I started doing product reviews, and I started looking at features of products, how I can describe them. And so it's like, it's weird, man, I was a chef for so long. And then I thought of myself as like, oh, entrepreneur, you know, like, event producer for a little while. And you asked us way early on. And so I'm kind of trying to tie a bow on it here, which is like, I think of myself much more as like a it's almost like a product designer at this point where I'm like, I'm really trying to get something that like when people kick the tires on it, when people see it, when people use it. They really are like, I want to tell my friends about this. And it's a completely new skill set that like, I I'm not I'm not great at it yet. And so it's like, being able to slowly hone that what's been helpful for me is just like, a lot of feedback, searching, a lot of just like brutally honest, you know, getting good at writing. All of that has been helpful. But you know, I get in such a flow state when I'm making some of this stuff, because it's like, I know that it's tracking towards a more positive industry. And that's always been the goal. I just didn't necessarily know how it was going to manifest. I think a lot of us want the industry to be better. And so I'm just hoping that it can be something that that has some legacy and helps helps a lot of people.

I think the idea of the station score is really cool. I know, you know, you're a metrics guy, right? Like, yes, you got to be able to measure things, whether it's your aura ring to track your sleep and totally sore or anything, like if you just arbitrarily say like, I think, you know, I think I work clean. Like, yeah, what you think we're clean isn't what I think we're clean are two different things. So if you don't have some metric of what that means, how can you tell if you're getting better? Or if you're sliding?

Well, let's, let's use that one as an example. Because, again, I went through all of this, and the listener might play along with me here on you know, kind of like going through my thought pattern and how I came up with this one. So working clean, actually falls into the setup metric for total station nomination. And the objective measure is, you fail your setup thing, it's a binary yes or no, if your station is impeded by tools, ingredients, or setups that don't apply or relate to the tasks at hand for longer than five minutes. So if you drop some beat pills on the ground, if I was sitting there with a clipboard, and I was evaluating your station, my timer starts. And it just becomes this thing of does that beat peel apply to the task at hand or not? And if it doesn't, it's like, get it out of the way. And I think what's so interesting about this, and you know, the listener might be thinking about this as like, oh, well, everything should just be wiped down quickly or everything. Like if there's a little mess, you should just clean it up. If any buddy's ever made pasta, your station, kind of from like take a step back and look at that. It's a really messy station, again, flour all over the place, like you're the with the crank thing that you're using your hands have flour all over them, your apron probably has a little bit of flour dusted on it, it's like, but that directly applies to the task at hand. It's like the flower that's dusted on there. And, you know, like, obviously don't have flower everywhere. But it's like, that is a very clear way of just kind of like really defining what does work and clean look like. And the five minute mark is also something that you want to because I think a lot of us have probably worked in kitchens, where it's like, sauce spills on the ground. Or if you ever, like walk into one of these, like big franchise locations, and you look in the back, and there's like french fries all over the ground, or, you know, sauce on the side of a wall or something like that. It's like, go 2545, an hour and a half of looking at that French fry sitting on the ground. And so all of that is like how I'm approaching all of these metrics of like, okay, what do we mean by working clean? It's like, Can you do it? Or can you not? And you fail, if you cannot? And so, yeah, go ahead.

Can I play devil's advocate here, please, please, because you talk about flow, right. And I feel like sometimes those things break flow. So you do have to batch out stuff, I talked about dishes, my wife hates dishes, and she will wash if there's a single dish in the sink. And for me, that breaks flow, like Yeah, I'm going to be cooking for an hour, I'm going to make three or four dishes, I am not after every dish going to wash the dish, I want to do all my cooking, get that out of the way, then wash the dishes. The same with sweep, like you don't want a dirty environment. So totally. And nobody wants to hear about dirty but the idea of like, I spilled some shit. Does it make sense to stop what I'm doing to go to the broom closet? Get a broom, sweep it up? Or do I just finish the task, which is going to be 1520 minutes, and then I'm going to do a good cleaning. So the opposite of what you know, no, no, but but for me, like, I feel like once I'm in something because I have a little like ADHD and I need to stay on task. And if I break out of that, then I'm just going to start puttering around doing other things if I'm in the zone cooking, doing my thing, don't make me stop to do something else. Yes, yes, something is filthy if it's a food hazard, something like that. But otherwise, I just want to keep rolling.

This is so like fresh in my mind. Because I was doing the set, I was doing the update to the setup module yesterday. And I made this graph, it's a graph of on the y axis is your output. So how much you can do in a given amount of time. And on the x axis is your cleanliness. And there's this every single point. So I go it's a spectrum. So I go all the way from disgusting at the, you know, worse end of cleanliness, all the way to pristine, and every single mark along the way you're losing output. And that's just a fact of the process that is just a given thing. I had a chef that I worked for who basically said like at that push point during service, when all of the tickets are going to hit your station at the same time, he's like, you're gonna have to sacrifice certain things. Because it's like, and nine times out of 10. For him, it was like, Well, normally, we would do like three perfect dots on the plate. But in this instance, we're just going to do one big dot, because it's like, you got to get the plates out. He's like that is coming at the expense of your output. And so this is this is the example or the visual that I try to lay out for my students of like, you have to notice. And the most important thing is there's a distinct plate, jump off between the top three so pristine is the is the you know, like, the photoshoot worthy. Maybe even like, this is how we leave the kitchen before we leave. If you're trying to constantly reset to that pristine way of being, food is going to come out pretty slow. Like that's just the fact of the matter. And then it's like right below that is clean. So that would be like you really want to kind of like as you get a little bit of a break to your wife's point of like, let's get the dishes all the way you know, kind of like put away now it's clean. The one right below that is tidy. And that's what I try to push my students to kind of like keep in mind. So you're constantly having this tug that's pulling you away from tidy. And the one right below tidy is busy, right? So like everybody knows that feeling of like when you're busy. It's like you're leaving a little bit of cleanliness off the table a little bit. But it's like once you get that gap and you're not busy anymore, you kind of pull it back to tidy. And so I call it this kind of like tug of war for your setup, where it's like something's pulling you back and it's like you're constantly trying to return to what I call the tightest state. If you can, you can define what that tidy state is for your station. And you're just constantly trying to build back towards that. I'm really glad you brought that up man because it was like every single one of these points. It's like I want to I want to refine, refine, refine till I get till I get to a place where every single dev double advocates devil's advocate response can be kind have, like, defused, or it's like, it's like, Oh, I've thought about this or like, there's a way that we approach this where, you know, like, it's like, it's a Gary Vee like, you know, eliminate excuses kind of thing. And so it's like, and I think it's so common, because it's like, there's so many people who have these frameworks who you try to you try to put it to work, or you try to you try to apply it. And it just doesn't, it doesn't work for me, you know, or I tried it in this context, and it kind of fell apart for me. And when you look at the people who have some of the best frameworks in the world, the James clears the Tim Ferriss of the world, it's like, even in other industries, it's like this ended up working. Thank you for doing that. Because it like really gave a lot of validation to what I spent yesterday doing. Do you think that that's a good way to approach it? I'm genuinely asking for

Absolutely. And this was just on my mind, because I have this conversation in my house all the time. My wife is also someone who's like one of those nervous cleaners. Like she's not Yeah, so just like, for her, it's like mental clutter. And for me, I try to get laser focused on what I'm doing. So it's like, I hate you know, I'm sitting down with my laptop, and I'm working on something and she wants me to stop to go, you know, water the garden, it's like, no, I need to finish this thing I'm working on. And then I'll do that. With the private chef. I feel like for me, I usually do like a four course dinner. The entree is the shit show, because like you talk about things like not being the same, you know, let's say this past weekend. The first course was pimento cheese. So I get to their house an hour and a half before, I've got 90 minutes to scoop pimento cheese, that's like pretty much made into a bowl put out a good second course is a soup, the soup is done. It's in a pot, all I have to do is label put two things on, by the time we get to entrees, we had two special diets. So it's three entrees. The special diets have different accompaniments, the side dishes each have three things and you're just like, in the weeds, like how do I get this food on the plate? How is it hot? How is it garnished and looking nice, and that's a nightmare. And it's the longest course for them to eat. And then the dessert is a pannacotta that's already made and set. And it literally comes out of the fridge and get some berries, but like that third course is where the rubber meets the road. And unfortunately, you're sacrificing some of the plating or, or something or it's easier to miss an ingredient because there's more going into it and it's, you know, what are your things that you put into place so that it's as good as you can have it be

when you get those objective metrics, when you have that, okay, my station can fall a little bit short, like it can, it can have the, you know, juice from the beef that rolled off the cutting board and it's on the countertop, it's like, that's fine, you can have a little bit of flour on the ground, that happens, it's fine. It's about really getting clear on Oh, well if the time the clock is ticking, and I have five minutes to figure this out, to get it back to tidy to not be impeded by these ingredients that don't apply to the task at hand. It's like that changes your behavior. And so how do you think about, oh, well, I'm gonna, you know, rest the beef on a tray with a rack, so that all the juices, you know, kind of like flow onto this thing that is not going to impede my station. So that when I go to slice the beef, it's it's, it's, you know, not gonna not gonna dribble as much all over the place. To the point that you were talking about on when that third course hits, I think a lot of us have had that feeling. You have this moment where you have the choice between do I wipe down? Or do I slice the beef and get it out to the people who are waiting? Because it's like, their only 25 minutes that you have to play with. And you're only one human most of the time, especially as a private chef, I know the feeling. And so it's this funny thing where I think that people will sometimes over macho fie it and just say, well just just do both, you know, like just just figure it out. There's like the you see that on chefs meme pages to where it's the it's the superhero, and there's the button and he has the choice between picking one or the other. And he's tweeting, and he's sweating. And he he and he does the the the you know, the Shah hands and he puts his pinkie on one and a stone on the other. And he's like, thumbs up. I did both. It's like, that's not always realistic. Like you genuinely have this moment where you have 18 people waiting. And the beeps hot. It's like, are you going to take the time to clean up the sauce that you dribbled? Are you going to slice the beef and serve the beef and come back and do it after the fact? I think it's just an interesting and that you know, we can talk about all the other ones if you want I'm happy to go through as many as you want but I I don't want to hijack the conversation if there are other talking points you wanted to go on but this is literally like I'm so I'm so in the thick of this right now. This is like all I'm thinking about?

Well, and you know, every good course worth its weight has gone through a number of iterations. I took a podcasting course that's still going on. And I took it back. You know, we started November 2020. I was one of the first group has maybe in the first dozen. And now there's hundreds of members and that course has continued to grow. They've added more functions. It's a lot more expensive now than it was And thankfully, you know, we're like grandfather then and we are allowed a lot of access to the new features. But you know, it's expected that, especially if you know, you're taking something maybe on the newer end that, yeah, it's going to be a good course, hopefully. But maybe new features are going to come and be added on at some point.

100%. And the real benefit comes to the students who took a chance on it when it was called the dummies skills course. Because they get, I take the same approach with all the products that I put out there. If you enroll in the course, you get lifetime updates, and lifetime access. So it's not this funny thing where I joke about this sometimes on my own content, but it's like, I don't really have a relationship with CIA anymore. It's like, I went there, I got my degree there. But it's like, am I continuing to get resources? They're not necessarily, am I continuing to get updates to you know, skills, one skills, two skills three that I took, I can't go in and you know, take that class again, at least not in a accessible way. You know what I mean? Like if I really reached out to them, and I really said, I want to do this again, they might say, Oh, well, yeah, you can come sit in on a three week block or whatever that whatever it is, the class schedules are completely changed to just totally fine. I don't have a problem with updates. I just think that education in the age of the internet should be a little bit more like a software product, where you get that email that says, hey, awesome news. Total Station on nation just updated. And good news, because you bought, you get free, you get this update for absolutely free. And yeah, it's like all these paradigm shifting. Why isn't it like this, you know, questions,

which is an interesting way to look at it, because it used to be you bought, you know, Photoshop or Microsoft or whatever. And then in a year, when they updated it, you had to buy a new actual, you know, slice wrong. Yep, yeah, or it or whatever. And now it's you just you have Adobe Creative Suite, and you pay a monthly or a yearly or whatever. And then it's constantly improving, as opposed to, oh, I still have Microsoft 97 on my computer, because I'm too cheap to buy the new CD ROM. Exactly. Exactly. That's old people talking, most of the kids don't know what we're talking about. I want to talk about the podcast a little bit, you have a podcast, yes. How big a role currently does that play in what you're doing? Like, how much of your time is spent on that? And how much you know, personal enjoyment? Are you getting out of it? Where's where's the podcast in the grand scheme of things right now,

I would say it's probably like 10%, of of just like my time, mental energy, I have really tried to do the work to and I'm talking to you about this off camera, Off mic, of putting systems in place to make sure that the podcast itself can continue to be something that I can stick with. And it doesn't become a burden, where I think you and I know people who have shows where it is 90% of their, their job. They're researching all the time, they're flying out in setting up, you know, bringing camera crews with him to set up interviews, they're, you know, pimping themselves out to go on other people's conversations and on other people's shows and do interviews. For me. Really, the podcast really serves two functions. Selfishly, one is networking. So if I want to get in touch with somebody, if I genuinely just want to, you know, learn from them, if I think that they could provide value to my audience, instead of, hey, do you want to do a YouTube collab? Hey, can we just hop on a call? And I just want to ask you a couple of questions on something. I still believe even in 2023, that having a podcast is one of the best just kind of like foot in the door mechanisms that you can have. Are you reaching out to everyone yourself? Yes, I'm still doing the reach outs. So talking about the system, that sensation part I use, and I'm super happy sharing the tools because I think your audience might get some I like when when when podcast people talk about tactics and like, Okay, but what do you actually use, you know what I mean? So Squarespace, the website, the company that I used to host my website acquired a company called acuity, which basically is like Calendly, for scheduling stuff. And so if you're going to be on the repertoire podcast, you get an acuity link, where it basically allows you to pick a time, I set specific hours that I'm available to do podcasts. It also helps save back and forth with me in the guest. Because I asked for their headshot, I asked for them to tell me the specific things that we want to that we want that we want. They want to see in the show notes of the episode. So for me, for example, I want people to go to join repertoire.com Or my instagram or my YouTube channel. If you know and I'm not saying you would do this, Chris, but I'm saying other people who produce podcasts might just do a quick Google search. And they might find OH Justin kinda has this dummy skills course, we're gonna link to that in the show notes. That's actually wrong. I don't want you to link to that. And so I put that onus on the guest, I say, hey, we want to, we want to make sure your business or whatever projects you're working on, get some love. Can you please share with us the two to three URLs that you want people to set to go to? To ask your questions to follow up to buy your thing, whatever onus is on them.

It can go the other way, though, because I've been asked to be a guest on some shows where they're actually like asking you to tell them the questions to ask, which is like, you're the intern not good etiquette. Yeah, like I like, do you even know who I like? Why do you want me on the show? Yeah, yeah. I want my appearance on your show to be different than my appearance on someone else's show. Which I want to use that as a leaving board for something else. Have you ever worked with a PR agency? Meaning like, Have you ever had someone from a PR firm reach out to you and say, Hey, I've got this guest? Yes. And is that something you do? Has it worked out? What's your experience been?

No, great question. I have had that happen. It almost always doesn't work. Why? From a couple of perspective, no one's ever asked me this before. This is a good question, Chris. So the first place is that the person it's like, Why? Why do they have a PR firm? Typically, they want publicity, Justin. Yeah. But it's, but it's for what you know. So I'll give an example I had, and I won't name them by name, I had a PR person reach out, Hey, this is a chef who has all this critical acclaim from XYZ place, and they have this restaurant. And it's very clear that the PR person is just ticking the podcast box for this person. And there's almost like an awareness campaign to the public, you know, public awareness, appearance, whatever, whatever. It doesn't work well for my show. So if my show was like a kind of like, Guy Raz, how I built this, you know, I just want to hear your story. I think that that that PR person doing that work is really valuable. The problem that I have is that they come on my show, and I asked them, tell me about this, you know, your favorite tactics that you use in XYZ role that you're in. So if this is a food photographer, this is a knife maker, this is a winemaker, this is a chef de cuisine somewhere. I want to hear what are the things that I can that my audience can selfishly use to add to their repertoire. That's like the whole purpose of the show. And I think a lot of these people who have PR people, not all of them are bad. But my experience so far has been these people just want to talk about their experience, they want to tell stories. And stories certainly have value. But it's like, the takeaways that I can get. And sometimes they aren't even media trained or prepared. So we'll get on the show. It's like, they ramble forever. They don't get to they don't get to the point. And so that that that tends to be frustrating for me. So yes, I do all my own reach outs. For that reason,

I've been working with a few of them recently. Some of them are good. Some of them are not so good. But a couple of interesting experiences. And I'd love to get your take on this. I know when it feels like it's right or not. But I recently did two episodes. And I'll say that the episodes were great. And it worked out well. But the PR rep actually sat in on the meeting, like they wanted to be in the meat camera muted, mic muted, but we're there, which is kind of like, Is there gonna Is this gonna go down a road where like, I say something and they're gonna come on and say, We don't want to talk about that. That did not happen at all. But I do think it's interesting. And I guess maybe that's why some people hire the bigger firms now. I would say I think that would be more typical with someone who's potentially problematic like I did have a couple of chefs in the past have their PR people reach out to me to be on the show and I know enough to know that they're like, they maybe were let's just say canceled a little bit and they're trying to you know, make their way back into the media and I was just like no, I'm not doing it. But with these others I just think it was you know, they're on a book tour or whatever right now and they're trying to get a lot of media attention but it's really interesting because they'll provide a list of like talking points which is nice if I don't know who they are, but I do have you know questions that I want to ask of my own because I don't want you to go through come on Justin show talk about this then go on ratio talk about the exact same thing come on my show go on a manual shit like that's boring right like why do you want to come on my show? Don't you want to come because I'm gonna give my own take like most of us listen to the same shows like I don't want to then hear the person on your show Justin and hear you ask them about their book or their you know, knife line or whatever. So He's just kind of interesting, but it's something that I'm dealing with now that I never really had before. But I do believe that building relationships with some of these agencies can be a good thing long term. And I just kind of want to see where it would go.

No at all great points, that you summed it up much better than I think I did, which is, I don't want that effect, either of the, I want to take the same bid, bring it to this show, say the bid, bring it to this show, say the bid. And I think that's what that's where I get frustrated is like, I respect my audience's time, I think a little bit too much of, if you want to know XYZ chef's background, they probably told it on splendid table podcast, or whatever. And that's the show to tell it on, you know, because their reach is so much bigger. I want to know, if you have a book, I think that that was I think that's where we might actually disagree a little bit where it's like, I want the chef who has a book, who has a couple of frameworks, who has, you know, like a cuisine that they ended up developing? Because I want to go deeper there on how did you actually end up teaching this in the city that you were in, because the city that you're in was known for this. But like, all the cooks that you brought in, were probably like a little bit confused as to why you were doing this technique on all of your proteins or whatever. So how did you navigate that? Like, that's the questions that I'm going to ask. And every interview is different. But it's, it's yeah, the frustration of getting the PR request. And and knowing that it's going to be a vanilla piece of content. Because yeah, and maybe this is just a testament to the size of our shows, it's like, we could be missing something you and I, we could the value of a good PR person is probably like, huge. And we just aren't big enough to see it yet. But to get to that place where the person is sitting in on the interview is weird. I had a production assistant who would sit on in on interviews once upon a time, that was really valuable because she was the one that was in charge of doing a lot of the clips and making the show notes. And so as the interview was happening, she was building out on a page inside of notion.

I would love that like timestamps of like exactly, well, this is gonna be the key takeaway, because I want to be here with you right now. I don't want to be sitting here making notes like we've been on 50 minutes. And that's what Justin gave the good stuff. Totally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I listen, I have done so many cookbook, guests recently, because I'm on these like lists with these agencies. And I love it. I've gotten to talk to people who I've admired my whole life, you know, like Marianne Esposito, who had a cooking show, it's been like 30 years, like, I would have never talked to her had her PR person not reached out to me. And she was really cool. And we got to talk about a lot of great stuff. But I do get a lot of pitches from people where it's not gonna work out. I've also had a lot of them who I work with, and they'll send me a list and say, okay, you know, fall is cookbook season, here's the 27 books, we're going to be releasing this fall, here's advanced copies, digital proofs, look through them, and just tell me, is there anyone on this list you would be interested in talking to? And you know, probably a third of them at max are ones I want to talk to. But there's some great people in there. But how do I make that an interesting conversation? That's not just like going, Oh, tell me about the soups. Like, tell me about this, you know, especially because sometimes they're not reinventing the wheel. It's like, oh, another book of salads. And you look through and you're like, Okay, I get why you're doing this, and you have an audience, but like, I'm not gonna talk to you for an hour about salads and your whole cookbook of salads. Like, there's got to be something interesting here.

Yeah, getting those even smaller episodes, I think that I, you know, came to terms with that actually being a viable option. And, you know, like, with, with just some solo episodes that I did that were shorter. And, you know, they get great numbers, you know, because people feel like they're a little bit more digestible. And so if I have someone who comes to my inbox and says, I wrote a pasta book, it's like, cool, there's 1000s of pasta books. Like, I would love for you to, you know, come on the show, but it's going to be like a mini episode. And we're just going to talk through a couple of like, your favorite recipes from the book, your process and writing it and where people can go find it. You know, like, that's our little piece of value, where you're still gonna get the value the audience capture, my audience is still going to be made aware that you have a project and if there are a pasta nerd, awesome. This is perfect for them.

I think sometimes you are drawn to the bigger guests. Yes, actually. So today's episode that released I had Nick de Giovanni, right. So he has huge YouTube. He has crossed the 10 million subscriber mark 11 million followers on Tiktok. Great guy to talk to. I found him through his agent. The chances that he is going to share this episode with his group are like, less than 1%. Right? He has, it would be huge for me, but he's not going to do it. First of all, he's mostly a video guy. We did not record Do there's no clips, I've already tagged him in the artwork on Instagram hasn't liked, it probably isn't going to share it. I sent it out to his PR team I sent them, you know, the cover art that I did direct links to Apple Spotify pod page. So what what am I actually getting out of it? It better have been a good episode, because he is not going to blast it out probably to his 20 million followers. And I think a lot of people like oh, man, this guy's got 20 million followers, that would be huge for me, he's probably not going to do I've never had his email address. It's gone only through his peer, I have no way to reach out to this guy and say like, Hey, I hope you liked it. I just hope that His people will pass it on to him. I could be wrong when we get off this call. Maybe he blasted it out to people, but chances are he's not. And I've seen this over and over, which again goes back to like, why do you want to come on my show? Because you're probably going on Good Morning America, or going on someone's show with 8 billion listeners. So I don't even always understand in the first place like why people want to come on my show when I have a smaller listenership if you're not going to share it, just like my two cents.

Well, the listener might hear Chris. And I just like lamenting and complaining about like running a podcast. And you heard that I say it's 10% of my time. Chris has just talked about all these headaches. And I think, to counter that, to potentially provide a couple of these benefits in addition to the networking and getting to talk to cool people like like, like Chris is sharing. Do you remember kind of what happened to like insert celebrity who gets a cancellation attempt?

Like Alison Roman? Yeah, like I could like I could see why you would want to have this body of work a PR person. Oh, interesting. It was like it was a very offhanded comment, in my opinion is like, oh, like who is you know, Chrissy Tegan to like, put out a cookbook, what does she know about food and cooking, and all of a sudden, it was like the world's biggest thing. And she's built this career. And now people hate her. And she's terrible. Because she said this. If I said that, or if someone said that on my podcast, and there was a PR person, would they step in and say, Oh, interesting. Hey, Chris, I love where we're going. Could we cut that out? Yeah, got it. I don't even know hypothetically, what my answer would be to that. Like, if you really were having a great conversation, and one, because I would also like to think that sometimes I run off at the mouth, and maybe say like, Yeah, can we like back that up a bit, you know, like, I don't want to out anyone, and have a gotcha moment where it's like, oh, that's gonna be really amazing. I don't want to do that.

I'm going the other way, almost. So I'm saying if you have that cancellation moment, and the only thing that you have out there on the internet is your YouTube videos, your short form, tick tock stuff, your tweets from six years ago, when culture was different, it's like, so easy to take a look at to assemble a body of evidence that says, You're not really that good of a person, because you don't have enough counter examples of the thing that I think a lot of us get value from when we're learning about a person, which is long form conversations. And so to me, it's like, as I'm grappling with all of these ideas, and trying to think about changing the industry for the better. It's like, I want to be able to have hours and hours and hours of content, to build just one show how I got to this point, but to to at least give a little bit of context and explanation as to why it is the way that I why I think this. And so that tends to be really, really helpful, too. It's like just the, you know, straight up practicality of being able to make clips and post a bunch of them on the internet. So it's like you make one hour long piece of content, and you get a bunch of additional ones from it. Three, if you can get someone on your podcast, because it is easier than having them fly to wherever you live and doing a video collaboration with them. You can use it to continue to upgrade the content. So I got Harold McGee on my show that hands down led to like five or six other conversations with folks that I probably could not have gotten just on my own, you know, reach out to quality. And so it's a it's a it's a medium that allows for compounding, which I think is you know, like it's a huge the, the marshmallow test effect, the delayed gratification compounding playing an infinite game. It's like, that is the only way that I think about any of the things that I'm trying to, like build or put out into the world. And to me, like a podcast is is one of the it's almost like it was built for that kind of thinking. And so that's that's why that's why I have one that's, that's that's how I use mine. And that's what I that. I just hope it provides value along the way for other folks because it's it certainly provides me value like just in the conversations themselves, but I see other benefits outside of, you know, just just recording the conversations and putting them out there. Well, it's

a huge social proof right that you're like they got like whoa, wow, hold me Keep an eye on this guy show. I've never even heard of this guy back, I need to check it out. Yeah, and, and working with these PR agencies this going back to Nick, like, they were happy with how it went. And they immediately the next day said, Hey, we've got this other person we would love to get on your show. And it's someone who's a pretty well known person. And you know, that just kind of snowballs. Like, I want to be the guy who some of these businesses come to and say, we've got a guest, and they're doing a limited amount of interviews, we would love for your show to be one of those stops, you know, as long as I can keep creative control and integrity of the show and still make it my show. Yep.

Go ahead. No, I was just going to finish out the process, because you asked a little bit about like, what that behind the scenes is like a little bit. So I do use Riverside for for recording my podcast episodes. It's, it's a great platform that I don't get any, I don't get anything for recommending it. But I just genuinely enjoy using it. And then I use the script to edit with a editor that that I that I have. So I just have a project rate for per episode. Video, audio and clips are all part of that package with with this editor. And they basically get rewarded for going fast. We have a bunch of templates that we can use. And then we just project manage it inside of a platform called notion. And so every single new interview gets a notion page, and we write all the notes, we take all of the, you know, details that they gave. So this is my website. This is my book. This is my project that goes into notion, every single linkable thing that the guest mentions, whether it's a book or a restaurant, or chef, we put that into notion, and then I've actually been enjoying using AI to kind of generate some of those show notes because it's really fast should just give Google Bard or chat GBT like here are some how are you getting that information into the AI machine? Yeah, so I it's all about prompt engineering right now. That's like the big

are you like copying and pasting in links to transcripts? How are you getting show notes? Oh, so like the tactical, like basic? Yeah, like, today's episode came out, I would love a summary or show notes or whatever, oh, interest. There's like a there's like a max character. Like,

I've tried to take a text transcript. But you can see if the batch at me like, I'm gonna give you five right chunks. Here's chunk one, here's chunk two, but it still never adds them up. It gives you a summary after each one. It's like, I want you to wait for the five things, and then summarize the whole so yeah, to get tactical, I want to know about Yeah, totally that into a chat. GPT. Yeah, so I we're still in the age of it's not that an AI is going to replace your job, it's that a human using AI is going to replace you. And your job is kind of the again, the current state of things. This is, you know, June of 2023. And so the way that I do it is my editor basically has the responsibility of every single time that I will say, it's going to be linked in the show notes, just, you know, keep going if the person is talking about something that's like a trigger moment where they say, okay, cool, I need to document whatever that person just said. And then aside from that, it's anything that someone would realistically hear, and want to research more on. And this is mostly in relation to kind of like, people places and things. If there's a you know, like, if I mentioned aubergine to Carmel as a restaurant, and this person worked there, and I got so much great experience at this place. That's kind of like a trigger moment for my editor to kind of like put that in notion. And they will say over the aubergine dip, Carmel, colon, and then they do another line. And then we talk about bonding Lee as a food blogger, bhanjyang li colon. And so now I have this list of it's almost like a title where it's like blunderingly colon Oberstein, to Carmel, colon, French Laundry, colon. I take all of that. So those are my kind of like chapter markers. And then I prompt an AI and I basically say you are a shownotes creating bot for a podcast. I'm gonna give you a list of people places and things. I need you to paste to their website after each one that I give you so that we can put it into the show notes. The kicker here is you need to make sure that the AI that you're using has access to the internet can basically skim websites because for a long time chat GPT especially wasn't able to skim the internet that's why I liked Google barn for a hot second here. But instead of that may very manual process of okay, I need an ulterior Epicure copy ulterior Epicure New Tab paste in ulterior Epicure you know make sure it's the right website, copy that go back to notion paste it in, you know that four step process just becomes one prompt, enter. And it's been 100% accurate for me, for the most part. There's been a couple of times where like the person doesn't have a website or I'm trying to get to their Twitter or their Instagram where I have to manually do it. But I really try to again because I get so nerdy on my show man and I'm really trying to offer these like, you probably you do this on your show too. I know you do. You'll you'll do this throwback from 12 years ago of this book, or this event, or this chef who's not cooking anymore, and all of his restaurants are gone. And it's like, if I'm a young culinary school student, and I want to read about the history of how Le Cirque became the Cirque, it's like, how do I make sure that I do that, and those are the type of people I want to attract to my show. So I need to make sure that I'm following through on giving them the resources to continue their education. And so my show notes, like, I take a lot of pride in my show notes, and I try to make sure that my show notes are good. And so for me, that's important for my show. For other folks, it might not necessarily be, but that's been a you know, just getting tactical. And then the last piece just to kind of really round this out, once the episode is done, I have kind of like a templated message that I send to people. Hey, so and so our episode is going live tomorrow, it came out really great. It's like a really important thing that I've learned of like, guests just want to know that, like, their audio wasn't screwed up, or there wasn't anything wrong with their video or whatever, or, you know, just like, is it a good piece of content, you know, like, it's just a little thing. But it's always like, just nice to hear like, Oh, our interview, I'm really happy with the way that it turned out. Because they want to hear that you have pride in it too. Here's the link to where the episode can be found across all platforms, I use a service called simple cast, to basically distribute my show, Apple, Spotify, whatever, whatever. It will also be on YouTube. And here's the link to that, because that's not on that page. Here are a couple of graphics that we're going to be using to promote the show. Please keep an eye out over the next couple of days for us tagging you in promotional materials. As the episode goes live, thanks so much for coming on the show. And so the hope is through the reach outs, it saved them time, it wasn't a ton of emails back and forth. I again respected them and really wanted to like have this again, to your point not be a gotcha style show. To the interview itself. They don't have to manage the files because I'm using Riverside. Even the promo I'm going to take care of the promo. We made all these clips, we edited it for you. It should be like, again, you work in a lot of these restaurants. And it's so like guest experience, guest experience guest experience. And to not take that into the projects that I do, which are also very, like, people focused. It's like, that's how I tried to look at all of this is like, how would you do a three Michelin star podcast process? As a solo person? You know what I mean? Like that's a little bit of an unrealistic standard. But you know, anybody who wants to read a little bit more about that can find the 11 star experience exercise. I think it's from Brian Chesky of Airbnb. Maybe it's, I can't I can't quite remember who Reed Hoffman. Reid Hoffman in the show notes. Yeah, Reed Hoffman, I think maybe I'm just throwing out founder names at this point.

I love that AI hack. And, you know, Tim Ferriss does an amazing job with that. A lot of people do a great job with that. Do you have any idea? There's no way. I mean, I guess if you host on your website, but you don't really know if people are using it, right? Like, that's my frustration is, you do all the show notes. But if it's on, you know, I host on Buzzsprout. I have no idea the click rate like is anyone clicking on this, that I do all this for nothing. And nobody ever went to this website of this chef who is cooking in Portugal or something like I don't know. And that's the hard thing is not knowing what works. When you have something on your website, you can see what people click on and go out to but you can't when you're using these third party apps, which gets frustrated. So you just have to either do it because you want to do it and hope that it works or, you know, it's

almost like the how Steve Jobs talked about, like how his laptops, no one, no one will see how the chips are laid out underneath this, this computer. But they need to be beautiful. Because whenever I think that there's a little bit of that, where it's just like, if I want the show to be like high quality and be respected and whatever, like you should kind of put in a little bit of that legwork to make it to make it nice in the shownotes. I also put a disclaimer in my show notes, which is if you ended up having to google anything from the show, or you couldn't find what you were looking for. And then I put an email, please email us here. I think only one or two people have ever utilized that. Which obviously helps you know that it's working. But also maybe just coming to grips with the fact that like, the show notes are for like 10% of people. I know for my own I always also try to take these conversations with like, what is my user behavior. So for my user behavior, if I'm listening to a human podcast, I'm probably only clicking on like, one link every four episodes, because I'm really not going on a deep dive into all the papers that he's linking and the scientists that he's talking about. But for the one time that I do need it, I kind of want it to be there. And maybe additionally it just like any time that you have the opportunity to increase your surface area of luck. It's beneficial. So I'll give a quick example on this. When I did my this place called French Laundry video this place called distance you worries that I have on YouTube where I go out to eat, I shoot the video I give a voiceover on the menu. I linked Masimo, deca, Stan Zoes wine. In the description of the video. I didn't know that video was going to blow up, I just wanted people to be able to find the wine that I mentioned in the video because it was something that I could link up. Come to find out. He was a longtime customer of the butcher shop that I used to work at, I completely forgot that he was. And he reached out and he said, Hey, we're getting all this traffic from our website from YouTube. Thank you so much for sending us all of this traffic. I you know, anything that you can do anytime you're in Napa, we'd love to, you know, like, Come show you the winery. And I'd actually love to come on your podcast, there's a there's an episode that him and I did where we just kind of connected. And so it's like, you don't know when those moments are going to happen. But every single time you take the especially now with AI, you take a 45 seconds to paste in all of the little checkpoints that you made. It can it's increasing your surface area of lock, which is like a Sahil bloom quote that I think that he talks about. And anytime that you can do that it's really, really beneficial. And so that's why I do shownotes it's like, You're right, 95% of your listeners are never going to click on anything. But it's for the 5% of nerds, who will.

I used to have similar experiences when I was doing more blogging back in the day, and not to get weeded into those stories. But yeah, that's what I love doing too is making sure I got hyperlink out as many things as possible there. I also think it's interesting that you and I both run, you know, somewhat similar shows, and we use almost none of the same things like I scheduled through Calendly. I do so much in word I record on a platform called remotely. I edit in Audacity and off onic. And I host on Buzzsprout. Right, like we can put out two shows of similar topics and quality. And the workflows. I don't use the script. I don't use note, like any of that. I don't use a single tool you use.

Yeah, even our headphones and mics for the people that might be watching on video. It's totally different

rose gold ones that says stole from my wife because they have better audio quality. So good.

But yeah, I think that that's a testament to that it's not about the gear, you know,

yeah. And you can always and you can always learn, like, I'm always interested in seeing what other people do. I love the idea of what Austin Kleon calls scenesse, which I think Brian Eno actually coined, but the idea that like lone genius is pretty rare. And the great ideas often come out of like a group of individuals, right. And that good work isn't created in a vacuum. And that creativity, you know, always is some sort of collaboration, whether you know it or not, you know, because you're reading consuming talking. So for you how important is it to whether it be collaboration or be part of a scene, but just to surround yourself with people in your same ecosystem, or also not just the same but like looking into like maybe you're really interested in woodworking and there's a lot of things from these, you know, woodworking woodworking YouTube videos that you've brought over, can you talk a little bit about like collabs partnerships and that kind of stuff.

If this ends up resonating with someone that's listening, great. But what I'm about to say is a piece of advice that I wish someone would have told young Justin. So that's that's kind of who this is for. And it's in relation to this thing that I think is semi uniquely American, also, you know, like a little bit of post industrial America, the kind of place where capitalist societies kind of take us and I'm not even trying to get political on this, I'm just trying to get set the stage a little bit. And it's this idea of being self made. And what I wish someone would have told young Justin is, it is not a final destination, that's worth pursuing. Not to say that it doesn't exist, I think there's certainly people who they have a laptop, and a good idea and just the right amount of timing, and they just made a product and they're completely self made. millionaires. I think there's also some really surprising stats on the amount of millionaires that exist, especially in the US, who did not make it through inheritance. And so I think that's what people are almost always kind of like nudging towards. But this idea that like, you got to where you are, without help, or without assistance or support or even money, like your customers are the ones that made you you know, if you have an investor, that person made you if you have a business partner, if you have employees, it's like all these people come together to influence your success. And I think for me growing up reading like, oh, well, Marco Pierre White got three Michelin stars at XYZ age, and he did it all by himself. really influenced and fucked with me on like thinking about how I approach projects and my own personal skill set, and the environments that I tried to try to put myself in. Because I wanted to be able to say that I wanted to be able to, like, get the plaque up on stage and be like, these are my three Michelin stars. And I work for enough people who also share that mentality. The fact that they weren't really great mentors, the fact that their work environment was really toxic, the fact that people were really quick to like, undermine them, or backstab them or whatever. It's almost like you get to that place and you can, like, you're gonna get the award, and you're gonna say, I'm self made, and it's like, Who are you going to share that with? You know, and I think about that a lot. In really breaking that, like, that's how I spent almost all my 20s was like, it's gonna be the self made thing. First time I got a business partner was like, Really, when it started to untangle for me. And now I'm completely in the other camp. It's like, I want to ask for help as often as I can. I'm even, you know, like, I there's a reason it's not called Justin connahs course, there's a reason it's, there's a company named behind it. There's a reason I went through all this stuff, because I'm wanting to make it bigger than just me. And so it's, it's, it's really breaking the frame of digging deep a little bit and asking, like, why do you feel like collaboration is a waste of time to the person listening? who's like, Well, I never collaborate or like, oh, well, it's all on my shoulders. And I think the counterpoint to this statement is like personal responsibility, right? I think that there's people who, you know, they swing too far the other way. And it's like, everything is other people's fault. The reason I can't make it is because of XYZ, you know, like, you become a little bit of a victim a little bit too much. And so you kind of want to find this happy medium, where you are sovereign and resilient. And you have this agency and sense of responsibility with things. But you really come to terms with the fact that like, insert person that is successful, they are beholden to, or they are facility there, they are made more successful because of other people. And I just, when when you when you play that thought exercise out, it's like you really start to get to this place of it's the wrong goal. Like being self made, and, and being the person where it all that shoulders everything is is really bad. It's a negative. And I think that is a macro frame to, to your question is is really where I think about it. But again, where it comes from, with collaboration and asking for other people to become involved and doing interview shows, especially I think there's a lot of people who do great solo podcasts, and they have a lot of success there. The example I share is I had this guest on Akshay birdwatch, He's a chef out in New York. And he, his family is basically the one that kind of like, started the restaurant. He's executive chef now. If someone asks me about family dynamics and restaurants, I'm just one guy, I have my experience. And I can share, I could do go down the rabbit hole of, you know, like figuring out the dynamics that happen. And why does this happen? And psychoanalyze this and read a bunch of papers on that. And, you know, or I could just go to Akshay and ask him, Hey, how are you navigating this? Obviously, it's one guy's perspective, maybe he's not a quote unquote, expert, because he doesn't have a framework that works, you know, like he just says experience. But I think it ultimately helps scale what the company in the show can do, because I asked other people for their expertise. And he has another thing that I'm certainly learning as I'm getting older of, like, if you can buy down your ignorance debt almost. It's like, well, I don't know about this. That's why I think education is so powerful, because it's like, you can actually take someone's years of learning and failures and trials and tribulations since like, this is what I know works. You can just extract that and just plant it into your brain, obviously, doesn't mean that you're an expert. But now you can get the experience knowing a little bit of this information that this person was so generous to share,

and humbling yourself a little bit because some people are a bit of a No at all, and almost don't want to admit that they don't know everything. I think you also have to be open to saying, jeez, I don't know anything about there's so

much I don't know. And there's so much that I could just like I could waste my time in going off and saying okay, now I want to learn about how to run a family business or now I want to learn how to do CPG food or now I want to learn how to do you know, like, insert thing that I don't know about? And it's like, if I'm truly all about giving people the most durable Versatile, adaptable repertoire that they can use to go launch their thing. It's like, it's going to have to come from a bigger focus group than just myself. And so I almost look at myself as like, I really like rules. Like, I really like following the rules to your point on like my fascination with metrics. Sometimes it's like, I know that I can be really good at just identifying like, where's the truth in this? Like, what? What is it that's actually happening here? You know, somebody might talk about, you know, like, running a running a fish, and burning a grill station is all about just like timing and nailing your temperature and whatever. And I it's like a weird ability, I have to, like, just look into it. It's like, oh, well, it's it. Maybe it's actually about just like managing the fire. It's like, if you can get that part, right. It's like, all these other things become easier. And so it's like, if that I noticed is a skill in me. It's like, can I leverage that to help the most amount of people possible by bringing in people asking them questions, and then potentially distilling it into something that is useful for people? So you know, I hope I answered your question. Yeah, that's how I got

it. And I think there's a difference between collaboration and, and seeing, and maybe a better word for seen as like community. But yes, I don't think these always have to be in the public eye. You know, one of the things I found that was the most beneficial for me these past couple of years, or some or something that I also really enjoyed was, you put together this group, you know, we're doing positive some days, and it was a meeting, every, you know, once a month, where you got, you know, anywhere from sometimes it was three of us, sometimes it was seven of us, but people who worked in kind of the food content creation space, to just get together on a zoom call and talk and it wasn't recorded. It wasn't publicized. It wasn't something for us to create content, it was for us to network, to ask questions, to share knowledge. And I think there needs to be more of that. And I think more people should be doing that is like seek out the people in your space. And people who are at different levels, people were doing different things, people are maybe two rungs above two rungs below, and just kind of help each other grow. And nobody on the outside knows about this thing that we did, right? Like it was just for us and to help us grow and, and to just have people to talk to because again, like with the personal chef, I talked about loneliness. And that, you know, if we've come from restaurant backgrounds, or kitchen backgrounds, where you have anywhere from a dozen to 100 people working with you, and then you're overnight working by yourself, you want people to talk to to bounce ideas off of, and I think more people should find a community to be a part of.

So a little bit more context there. Thank you for the kind words on that. I think it's stemmed from two places. One, there's a kind of legendary Mr. Beast interview, where he talks about when he was really starting to think about going pro, like the Steven Pressfield going pro on YouTube. He had this moment where he had I think, four or five, six guys that were all doing YouTube stuff at the same time. And they would talk like almost every day on, here's what I'm thinking about thumbnail creation, here's how I'm transitioning, here's how I'm thinking about audio, here's what camera I'm using. And they all grew together. And it was this like, huge growth moment for Mr. Beast where he was just like, I didn't have just one brain trying to solve this problem. I had five. And I could take their learnings and I could use it on my videos. And I thought this guy screwed this up or had this really big success moment. And so I use a little bit of that. And everybody was there supporting, which is very counter to I think what a lot of us experience as creators or entrepreneurs where you do it in isolation, nobody can really understand what your what it is that you're up to, or what it is that you're trying to build. So that was part of it. And then the second one is positive some days is when I called it su MDAYS. Because there's a lot of people who talk about this idea of like positive sum games, which is if Chris gets a sponsorship for the podcast, it's not coming out of my pocket. It's not something that I'm losing. If you subscribe to the repertoire, podcast, and then you subscribe to the line cook thoughts podcast, and then you subscribe to The Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. It's not like I'm losing. It's all positive some. And so really getting that culture kind of like talked about in a more positive way because I think, Chris, you you probably have people you can think of who make content and they get a sponsorship with a brand and they don't want to talk about it because like maybe maybe that brand won't start working with them anymore. I don't want to talk I don't want to talk about I just I just got a chance to interview this person because no that's that's not how I operate. That's not how I like to learn. That's not ultimately like the friends that I want to have. And so how can I you know, almost cultivate this. And you can do this for whatever you're working on for working on CPG brands, who else is you know, doing, trying to develop products for

stores real life like yes talking about this, like Bobby Hicks retro recipes kitchen. He's been a guest on my show. I've never heard of him before we started this group Yeah, there's just so many people out there. And he's someone who, besides our meetings, like I actually had a brand approached me about something. He's really good with brand deals. I reached out to him and said, like, Hey, can we talk? Absolutely give me a call. I'm free hop on the phone like that day. And we just talked about and he wants to know, you know, what they were offering kind of what I was thinking, we talked numbers, he actually said, I've talked to this brand. Here's what you should be asked like someone to help me out navigate. He was very open about, you know what, what he thought about with that, and, like to another step today, he texted me and said, listen to the show, I thought it was great. Like, this is someone who's become a friend, like my best friend, like my best man at my wedding. I don't think he's listening the show at all. He and he shares how then text me this morning to say, hey, great show, I really liked it, you know, so we're building real relationships. In this circle. It's so much more than just a bunch of people doing food media, who don't really care about each other. I've built some great relationships with so many people in this space. And I'm really appreciative for those connections I've made.

Yeah, thank you, man. It's been great to see that group grow and blossom and become so so helpful. I mean, the bad news is, man, you're not self made anymore. Sorry, Chris. Then did you look at that in you're like, Fuck off, I don't care. Like this was super helpful that I would way rather have this reality. Then you saying, Okay, well, I'm struggling with the sponsor thing. So I'm gonna, you know, go down the rabbit hole, and I'm gonna hire a consultant. And I'm gonna, like, do all these things. Like, play life on a little bit more of an easy mode. You know, like, take the help when you can get it. You know, there are people who are better at things than you are.

And it's interesting, because you're talking about Mr. Beast, like looking at YouTube, you see way more actual collaboration? Yes. Again, going back to Nick, who was just on my show, like, if you watch his videos, he's done videos with Mr. Beast, you know, he just did a video with Gordon Ramsay where they broke the Guinness Book World Record for the largest Beef Wellington. But I think the guys on YouTube who've been successful you see the crossover, which I think is interesting. Like I always loved crossovers, whether it be movies or TV shows when I was a kid, isn't it cool to be watching? A Nick de Giovanni YouTube and you see Mr. Beast, right? You're like, I know him, like my kids are like I know him. And I don't think there's enough collaboration in the non YouTube space like, yes, podcast, you and I, this is a collaboration. But I think people think collaboration, and it has to be like, you know, pop ups together, it doesn't have to be something so extreme, I think there's ways to collaborate and help grow each other's audiences, in smart ways. And I I'm going to continue to kind of find ways to do that,

I want to just touch up on a couple points that the listener can now use if if this sounds attractive. So you have your signifiers that make this person a good fit for this group that you're going to start conversations that you're gonna have WhatsApp thing, you're gonna make a Slack channel, Discord, whatever, whatever it is. Mine is just on Zoom. And I just, you know, invite the same guys every almost every single time. And the first signifier for me was that it was not recorded. So I think there's a lot of folks who, when the mic is on, they feel like they have to be on. And I think that's totally fine. But I asked myself would would the fact that this is recorded, prevent someone from being vulnerable? Asking the question, they really want to ask, sharing a struggle that they're probably going through that I think probably applies to the whole group? The answer was, yes. So the rule was, this is not recorded, I'm not going to try to like, you know, try to thumbnail your reaction for content leader. This is like this is a place where you can come, you can talk about whatever ails you. So that was thing, number one. Number two, being really clear on kind of like, what it is that we're talking about in this group. And so I often come with a lot of notes. So if you're going to start a private chef group in Houston, it's like you as the organizer, you have this responsibility, because you're hosting the party to come with. And it doesn't have to be this long list of topics. Hey, guys, today we're going to talk about pricing. I just kind of want to talk about like how I price my stuff. I want to share some examples of clients that I've gone through in the past. And then I kind of just want to open it up to you know, like, what everybody else is either struggling with or taxes that you've seen, be successful. And then you can just let the conversation go from there. I think I moderate like a little bit of the start to these conversations. I don't really do much from there. I just kind of like bounce it around the room. And then the third thing, and this kind of just, I mean, like it's valuable I think we realize, Chris You and I, I think a couple of the other guys in this group. It was like it turned into like it is right now just a bunch of us guys, because I think that's another funny call it a societal tweak, problem issue that for whatever reason, wherever we're at masculinity is This weird state, where it's like, guys don't come together to talk about stuff in the same way that I think they did, maybe when our parents are growing up, maybe even then they didn't really do it that much. And so to have a place that, again, is not recorded, you're surrounded by people who understand your problems. And that's another really interesting piece here, where it's like, not one person in positive some days, doesn't know what it's like to upload a video that doesn't have any audio on it, or have to, you know, lose a file recording, or have to, you know, like, have a sponsor bug them about the due date, all of us kind of understand each other's problems. So being clear about what that invite list looks like, where it's like, okay, maybe, maybe you like this person as a human. But it's like, if they don't understand the problems, it's like, it's maybe, you know, maybe not a good fit for them. And so, all of that has been really helpful for us so far. I've had, you know, a couple, you know, tweak bumps in my schedule come up where I haven't scheduled one in a while, so I'm overdue on getting one on the calendar. But um, yeah, it's like, how can you make it easy for people to sign up? How can you not record it to make people feel comfortable? And how can you moderate it in a way where it leads to just like great connections, great results? Yeah, that's what's, that's what I've enjoyed about hosting these.

Everything changes so quickly, in our space, and every space with technology and everything, too. And I think that's one of the big things is, you and I have mentioned AI a couple times as conversation, when we when you started that group, like a year and a half ago, that wasn't even on the table? Like nobody would have said, Oh, how do you best use AI for your podcast, right. So having people who also are doing a whole bunch of different things and staying on top of it, like not everyone's may be staying on top of AI. But if one or two people are and you can provide some info, that's great. And that's what I think, is so beneficial, because whether you're talking algorithms, or AI, or some other new tech, hopefully, someone's got something beneficial to share. And that, you know, you can help us navigate that, or we can help each other navigate that, you know, pretty, I don't wanna say seamlessly, because we're all going through learning curves on that stuff. But that's great. So one of the questions I really want to ask is, What are you reading these days, because I know you're a voracious reader, whether it's books, blogs, any of that, what are you into,

so I just got this book. It's called Scaling people. It's from the cofounders of stripe, I think. I mean, I know it's, it's, it's from stripe, I don't know if it's from the co founders directly, but it's from, you know, one of their HR people. And so this talks about like huge company scaling stuff. But it talks about essential operating principles, goals and resources, a comprehensive hiring approach, like intentional team development, feedback, and performance mechanisms. So it's very, like head in the clouds a little bit with like, this might not apply to your private chef business or your catering company. But I think a lot of us who like work with people, again, to the point of like, this doesn't get really taught anywhere, especially in like a culinary school. Like if you went there, you probably learned a lot about great techniques and stuff, maybe a little bit about business. But when it comes to like, even looking at your p&l, your labor is probably your highest expense. And so it's like if your your knowledge set to how to manage those people is not, you know, meeting that what you're spending on labor every single month, like there's probably a little bit of a disconnect there. So so there's that I've really been enjoying out live by Peter, Tia. So I probably have like two more chapters, I'm listening to, yeah, I'm listening to an audiobook, and I wouldn't have like, three or four hours left. And so I'm kind of on the tail end. The reason that's important to me is because my mom suffered with cancer, my dad suffers with Parkinson's and cardiovascular disease. I don't have any metabolic disease. But Peter calls those four The Four Horsemen of what kills most people. And so if I know that I have these problems that are, you know, genetically, there's, there's some correlation, sometimes not always, there are lifestyle, things that I can do to, you know, just like take care of my health. And I've gotten a ton of value from Peters content over the past few years, and so been really enjoying that. I'll touch on just a couple more just in relation to just this bigger mental model that I've been thinking about, which is, I think you have your many episodes that you did on it, we're talking about what is a chef? And so the way I define it, if people haven't listened to that is someone who works with food, who holds a sense of responsibility about the work with the food that they do. And so people have talked about like, oh, well, you go from cook to Chef. And I've been fascinated with this idea of like, there's a level beyond it, which is entrepreneur. That's when you start the company, that's when you start hiring. That's when like all of these like E Myth revisited, which is a book problems start to come into it. And it's funny because the author of that book talks about a pie shop owner as like the subject for the whole entire book that they write about. And so it's not necessarily that I'm reading these books, but I'm almost like, trying to think about okay once total station on donation as a course is at a place where like, the product is there, I really want to start to pivot to start to think about a little bit of that's basically my project on the horizon is kind of like going from Chef to entrepreneur, and what are the kind of like, can't miss frameworks, skills, tactics, that a lot of these books talk about if you're trying to build the next Snapchat, right, because that's when a lot of them were written. But that can apply to Chef's thinking about product market fit, and all these buzzwords that I think, work for people making, you know, like E commerce companies, they still certainly apply to chefs. But it's like, how can I, again, be a little bit of the shepherd of that knowledge? And really, you know, proliferate that and construct it in a way where I'm sharing what the rules are. And then chess can apply them to be more successful and ultimately launch healthier, more sustainable organizations in the future.

Yeah, I don't I don't think it has to be and probably even shouldn't be necessarily related to your industry, you know, like to learn how to grow in a personal chef business. Like I have a masterclass subscription. And one of the things I've been going and listening are courses on from writer like David Sedaris, like he's a writer and a humorist. But like, how does that because it's really storytelling, and I have a podcast, I'm also trying to convey my word, whether it be written on my website, or via email, it's like, how do you become a better writer, but also storyteller, like he talks about just like observation, and making notes of things in the world. So you wouldn't think about how listening to a David Sedaris masterclass on you know, humor writing is relatable, but so much of it was? And that's where I like to draw from sources outside of the food and beverage world. What are you loving right now, that was the other one, like what's really exciting you, again, not necessarily food and beverage,

I am really enjoying playing tennis a lot. I think that there's a there's a local tennis club here in Seattle, that does, it's called a ladder. So basically, everybody gets ranked. And then you can play anybody within a couple of rungs in the ladder from you, if anybody can visualize that. And it's really been helpful to really lean into it as like another type of skill development that's also competitive. I think that I'm such a competitive person, man, like I love just like, stories about athletes. Like I watched a lot of Dragonball Z growing up, like, there's a lot of, you know, just inherent competition, there's a bone there that I that I just love, kind of like pulling on and using. But the problem is, as you just heard me talk about this positive Sunday's thing that I that I, that I do, it's like, it's not always the best place to use the competitive thing. In, you know, the work that I do on the day to day, because it's like, I don't want to constantly be like, going to my students and be like, I'm so much fucking better than you. You know, like, That's stupid, you know, and I don't feel that, you know, I don't, I don't bring that energy to teaching, I don't bring that energy to this podcast, I don't bring that energy to YouTube videos, or tiktoks, or even positive Sundays that I host. And so to have that as like, an outlet for my competitive energy is really, really awesome. And that's why I'm loving it right now. Additionally, there's just like, I don't, do I have plateaued on a lot of my like, cooking technical proficiency things, you know, like, whisking, basting a steak in a pan, knife cuts, like, I have a whole series on knife cuts on my YouTube channel, because I think that I have genuinely developed it to a place where like, I feel good about it. And so to have something where it's like, you know, I don't really follow through that well, on my backhand, or like, I need to have more rotation on my serve. And I can work on that to three times a week, there's something about that, that is just very, like, just sharpen the saw and go out and just continue chopping up the tree. And, I mean, the fun example that I'll that I'll share is like, I have this one guy that I play. And he would beat me every single time when we first started playing two years ago. And we're at a place now where we play at least once a week now. And I think I'm on a four match win streak against him right now. Because I have just been consistently thinking about like, stroke improvement, you know what I mean? And doing the boring work, you know? And so that's why I'm, that's what I'm loving and why I'm loving it. And I can for anybody listening, who is like, Oh, well, I, I am a competitive person or I am a, you know, like, artistic person, maybe and I'm bringing too much of that into my work and it's causing problems. It's like, is there another outlet that you can, you know, kind of like, bring into your life to still scratch that itch. But have it be in the context of something else that is maybe even completely unrelated, but it helps you

especially nice to have things that are on related. I'm talking about my show now. And I think, you know, like, I started doing karate a year and a half ago. Which is crazy, because I think most listeners have some idea of me, but I'm going to be 47 in, like, next month, I'm six, four. And at the time when I started was like, almost two at like, really big. And I started as a white belt with my son, who is like, was at the time, like 60 pounds, you know, 10 years old, I think it was nine actually, it's scary for so many reasons, like 1am, I just gonna jack myself up and get hurt doing this. But I'm, you know, at the time, the, like one of three adults out there. So all these parents are sitting on the sidelines watching. While you're out there, humbling yourself, like doing this thing. I have no basis never done martial arts in my life at all. And I just have to go back to like, what was when was the last time you did anything that you had no base understanding for, like, there's a lot in the culinary world, like I've never, let's just say butchered a fish. But I've worked with knives. I've seen it like this was like I've you know, besides watching like the Karate Kid, or Bloodsport, like, I have no base knowledge of anything. And it's humbling, but you know, then there's that sense of achievement, like as I move up and get proficient and start to get my belts, and it has nothing to do with cooking, you know, but the physical aspect, like I needed something to help keep me physically fit and active. And it's been really great. And just wanting to push myself to achieve that. And that has nothing to do with any kind of business. I'm doing.

So good. I'm gonna publicly give you two congratulations. One is on the health changes that you made, because like, huge kudos, man. Like, we haven't, I've said it to you Off mic, but just you know, for the, the listener, I try to do this with everybody who is in my life that I'm you know, close with who is, you know, doing taking steps and building habits that it's like, it's fucking hard, you know, and it seems like this far off distant thing that's never going to be achievable. I have people in my life who don't have the best health in the world. And it matters, right for not just yourself, but for the people around you. So I wanted to say that. And then I also wanted to say kudos for 200 episodes, man, like, huge. It's dude, what Yeah, yeah. And to

have you know, like, I don't have a huge listenership. But when I look at the numbers, like for me, like I'm over 100, you know, I'm like, over 125 that, like, when you think about how many times someone has listened to that, to me, that seems unreal to some people, they have huge audiences and followings. And they hit that early on. But for me, it's still like, wow, that's a lot of people listening to my stuff.

And most people will never be able to say that they did 200 of anything, you know, so for you to be able to just like continue to take those learnings and growth mindset, you know, feelings and strategies into what you're building is, it's, it's, it's awesome. Let me tease a couple of dot points that were on my list that we didn't get to get to, then what you can do is you can let us know on Twitter, or Instagram, if this would be interesting for a follow up episode. So I have a couple of friends who I coach their private chefs and their pop up posts. And we've had some really interesting, the most viral clip that you and I had from our conversation on my YouTube channel was around pricing. And so I have a couple of new frameworks that I've been thinking around pricing for chefs to get paid earlier, get paid faster, make it a more attractive offer for clients. And so if that would be something that you want to see Chris and I jam on, please just let us know. We'd love to hear from that. I think Chris and I both as podcast hosts sometimes lament over the fact that like, we can't always see where you're listening from, we can't always see what you're thinking we can't always see or, you know, like, what opinions you might have on things. And so you got to kind of follow up with us on some of these other platforms. The other one was on using AI to draft up contract language for clients, because I think a lot of us as chefs don't often go to law school. And we often take things like contracts or, you know, like agreements or even job descriptions for things that we're trying to hire for contractor wise, and we just kind of like, well, I just won't do it, or, you know, I'll just, I'll just skip this step. And it ends up biting us in the butt. And so I have some, you know, productive frameworks there that I think could be helpful. And the last piece is on menu writing, and just organizing your ideas. It's been a couple of success stories that I have with people that I've worked with, where you want to avoid the blinking cursor syndrome, when you go to write a new menu, and I have some ideas that are that I'd love to share with your audience. And so if any of those sounds attractive, just please let Chris know, and we will do another episode together.

I already want to do that. Anyway. I'm sure that people will be Don't spoil it, Chris. But let me know I want salad. I want to we want

to hear from you on which one which ones you want specifically covered and why why you think it might apply to you or even just like in your context. So pick one, tell us in the context and we'll we'll we'll be sure to make it for you,

Justin, there will be obviously shownotes. If you want to send people to one place, or just like two places where the best places to send them.

Yeah, so go to my newsletter it is join repertoire.com/newsletter. And that's going to be the place where you're going to hear about everything that's launching with total station domination version three, I'm doing a full breakdown of the bears season two, which is dropping tomorrow, which I'm very excited on. And you'll basically get heads up on all my new podcast episodes that go live. And so that's where you can hear about it.

Fantastic. It will all be in the show notes.

I love it. Thanks, Chris. And congratulations. Thanks.

I really appreciate it. That means a lot. And to all of our listeners. This has been Chris with the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. Thanks so much and have a great day. You're still here, the podcast is over. If you are indeed still here, thanks for taking the time to listen to the show. I'd love to direct you to one place and that's chefs without restaurants.org. From there, you'll be able to join our email newsletter. Get connected in our free Facebook group, and join our personal chef catering and food truck database so I can help get you more job leads. And you'll also find a link to our sponsor page where you'll find products and services I love. You pay nothing additional to use these links, but I may get a small commission which helps keep the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast and organization running. You might even get a discount for using some of these links. As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram at Chefs Without Restaurants or send me an email at chefs without restaurants@gmail.com Thanks so much