Get Rich During the Recession : Selling Chicken!

And so we decided on using Mary's organic chicken, the same stuff that you find at Whole Foods.

It is air chill.

Explain this one.

So instead of hanging them, hanging the chickens upside down, they go in this.

Room that has a low oxygen environment.

So they just pass out.

Welcome back to my current podcast, Chicken Money. If you guys notice from my last video, my money's gone vetted all on the Tampa Bay Lightning. So cross your fingers. I'm going to be very wealthy if Tampa Bay wins the Stanley Cup. anyways, we're back with Edmund, because our last video podcast ran so long that I literally had to stop in the middle of it because it was, like 2 hours, and it was a phenomenal podcast. I actually almost cried. I made it a vow not to do any emotional stuff today. So today we're either going to talk about two things. edmond's amazing sex addiction or a little bit of the business side of Houston's hot chicken.

They don't have a sex addiction. We're doing a second podcast today.

You don't have a sex addiction?

No, I don't hurt. What we're going to start with listen.

Am I under the wrong impression that having six to eight girls enough.

We're not going to talk about this. Let me paint a picture for you.

Okay.

What this podcast is going to do he's learning.

Yeah.

I learned myself from yesterday's podcast. I looked at a clip. I was glad we're doing a psychic podcast. So four years from now, okay, you'll be 40. I won't be 40. I'll be 39. 39?

Yeah.

Hopefully 40. I know. I feel fucking so hopefully married.

Okay.

Got a beautiful wife, got a beautiful child, right? One kid on the way. I mean, one kid already there, and hopefully another kid on the way.

You're literally going to have to start this right now.

That's what I'm trying to get at.

You haven't met a wife yet.

I have a couple of prospects.

Couple?

I have this one girl that I'm really interested in, and if it works out with her I showed you pictures.

Of her, they're all drop dead gorgeous.

I mean, all she all of them.

Are dropped dead gorgeous. My wife and I it's funny because my wife and I, we actually have this, like, legitimate conversation when we travel with Edmund or we go somewhere with Edmund, how long the girl will last, whether it's a couple of hours a day. There was one time listen, I don't.

Want to talk about this. Let me finish my story.

Okay.

So I'm having dinner with my wife, my kid, all right? I've been working on this beautiful wagu porterhouse for like, an hour. Grilling downstairs, preparing it all.

That right, downstairs. Still live in a condo?

No, because you're grilling down high rise now. But no, it'll be like good point.

All right.

You're grilling in your backyard at this point.

In my backyard?

In your mansion.

Yeah, because backyard in burbank.

So we're neighbors.

Possibly.

Let me finish.

I'm just trying to get better context, edmond.

I'm just all I can think about is my wife and my kid.

Yes. Okay.

That's the point of the story. Now my house. So getting ready to cut into this steak, right? My wife there is she's smiling. The aroma of a steak is just filling up the room. I'm like super excited.

Okay.

And then my wife gets a text.

One of the other women.

No, from our bridesmaid, her best friend. Okay, got it. Hold on. No problem.

Okay.

I've got the fork over here. I look at my wife with like a small amount.

She now has a twelve inch plate in her hand.

No. Her face turns sour. Okay. And then she presses down on her phone and this video plays. I hear this very distinct voice. Mr. Houston crossed out. It's a video of Houston cross of this podcast saying, edmund, let's talk about your sex addiction. And all I can think about at this point is my life is ruined. There's three years of couples therapy. I'm never going to financially recover from this. Going to divorce me, take half my money. And yes, we'll be neighbors because I'll move in upstairs, you're downstairs. fuck you. You and my marriage. You in my life. Because of your 50,000 view podcast, we're not going to talk about that.

Hopefully in four years, this video has born 50,000 views.

Yeah, I hope so too. I don't have an addiction. I won't put that same way. You don't have a gambling addiction. You have an abundance of cash.

Right.

And you have an abundance of women.

No. Okay.

You have an abundance of cash. So if you spend one 2510 thousand dollars making a bet, it's okay because to the normal person, that's average person, that's like a 20 $30 bet.

Right.

A gambling addiction is when you're like robbing and stealing and borrowing money from people, putting on your credit card leveraging. Exactly. That's a gambling addiction.

So normal guys have like two to three prospective women and you have two to 3000.

No.

I'm trying to understand. No.

Okay.

I don't go to clubs. I don't go to bars. I don't go chasing tail.

Okay.

I don't, I don't do this. And you've known me in the last four years. I've been on and off with my ex. Very off. But if you bury the ones just end at once.

Exactly.

So when I'm with her, very little. Just her.

Yeah, I I can test of that.

When I'm single, it's open season. It's free range.

Right.

I agree to do whatever I want.

The two to 3000 prospects that you have.

Yeah.

So last night actually, after softball, I'm home watching one of my favorite shows, peaky blinders.

Okay.

New seasonality. Should watch it.

Very nice.

I like this show, actually.

Yeah.

So I got two texts.

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One is the stupid text. Miss you.

Whatever.

Right?

Yeah, we pass on that one.

Yeah. And then the other one was, hey, what are you doing? Trying to come over. What do I do?

What do I do?

You sent the Miss you girl kiss emoji and went to her house.

No.

What are you doing, girl? You took her to dinner.

No, this is like last night at like 10:00.

Oh, yeah, she just came over then.

You would think that if I had an addiction. Yeah, but I just ignored both. I was like kind of boozed over anything. I don't have an addiction. I have an abundance of options and sometimes I like to have fun, but no addiction here.

I do feel like your options list is growing much shorter ever since you've grown a mustache.

I went home yesterday after this podcast go to brushing my teeth and I.

Was like.

This is not happening. So, yeah, I'm going to rock it. I'm not a quitter, so not stopping this much as I like it.

I think you look very bad. But I do too.

It's okay.

Honestly, it's comical. And for the first time in my life, I look better than you, which is wonderful.

Still very debatable.

I know that's really great and I'm glad we got to air that out and I'm happy for you, but thank you. I do want to make a recommendation that I made this recommendation for one of my friends that got divorced. He visited me after not seeing him for like three years recently. I told him that treat therapy like a normal thing.

Right.

Don't ever get into a relationship and then force yourself into therapy when you have issues, because those issues are often created because of non communication or lack of communication.

Right.

Lack of trust, lack of something.

Right.

But mostly likely it's a form of communication. So if when you start your relationship, let's say you get serious two or three months in and you're dating on a regular take once a week and just go talk. It doesn't have to be a therapist, but it should be talk to someone.

That's a red flag.

And it's not just talk about the.

Things, okay, you're married. You can say, I've done it.

No, I've done it before. Me and my wife did this. We went to therapy, and we complimented each other. We talked about anything with our life, our business goals, our personal goals, our family. And we made it a point to, every week, have a third party involved in our conversation. And I got to talk about my wife to this person, about how much I loved her.

Right.

And it became normal. But then there was times when I was like, hey, you did this, this and this. That bothered me.

Right.

I got that out, too. And we never you know, me and denise have been together for, like, 13 years now.

I know.

And she could stab me, and I wouldn't divorce her.

So you went to therapy after you had your first child?

No, we went way before that. Way before that. About six months, seven months in.

Okay.

But it wasn't considered therapy. It was like we were just talking.

So what I went through was therapy.

Yeah, but when we needed therapy, it wasn't abnormal, and both of us had already agreed to have that type of communication. So when we had a legitimate issue, we got through it real quick. It took three months. So I'm just saying, my point is.

Mine was a little too late.

Right?

Yours is way too late. And that's why I don't think it got solved.

Three months, found that I was not the issue. So that was a good thing from.

That, and I can attest that edmund is not wrong. That was crazy.

Like, literally crazy. The entire time in the relationship, I thought, something wrong with me.

I definitely did, too.

I thought I was the issue.

No, I 100% did too.

And actually, I was like, good manipulators.

They're very good.

All right, let's talk about Houston's hot chicken. Is that what we're doing?

So, look, I want to talk about Houston Hot Chicken, because the more I talk about it, the better I feel, because I'm very confident in this business, and I'm so surprised that the market has adjusted so abruptly, even though I'm a pessimist or a realist. And I've been talking about the downturn in the economy for, like, probably like, a good 15 months. I'm actually one of those guys who sold a lot of things immediately after the pandemic.

Right.

Personally prepared, saved my cash, got ready. My business didn't. I kept all my cars, which which ended up helping me because I didn't think it was going to be long lived. But personally, I really prepared. I sold my house. I rented one. You know, I had a lot of cash. And that's a lot of the reason why Houston Soup Chicken expanded so fast, because both of us kind of did the same thing. I mean, when you were building houses in Tampa, you stored a lot of your money, you took a lot of it out and didn't continue to build because you were saving it, because you.

Had anticipated the recession also since 2019, pre COVID.

That's basically about the same thing. We both kind of had the same plan.

Then COVID happened. Recession was like 30 days. It's like a half recession. Yeah. Real one looming around us. This one's going to be interesting, but I'm surprised. So we went into bear market. Bear? Yeah, sorry, foreigner.

I just bear?

Yeah, bear Market two days ago. And then it bounced back. We're out. Yeah, it's been two days. We're all green. So all my stocks, because I took a lot of puts, put options going down and stock markets going up. So I don't know. I'm happy that the market is going.

Up, but it's inconsistent now, and I think that today we live in a very transient world where people go in and out of different opinions really quickly and everybody's trying to be a day trader, swing trader, or time the market.

Right.

I think that has a lot to do with our volatility, is the younger generation, which is typically I mean, I don't know when you bought your first stock. I actually got my first stock for a birthday gift when I was 16, and so I learned about it very early. I didn't really invest long term, but I like to buy casino stocks when I was younger because I was like, my dream was to run a casino.

Right.

That's what I really wanted to do. I didn't really pursue it, but I thought it was really cool, you know, me having my gambling addiction and all, you know, own a casino, go downstairs, bed 100,000, lose it.

Oh, shit.

It's my money anyways. Yeah, but anyways, I pursued something else. But my point was, it's like, you know, I knew about it, but I didn't really I wasn't active. That wasn't really my generation. But these new kids that are 1620 years old, I mean, we met handful of guys that were, like, in their young 20s, had that 100 fence, remember?

Yeah.

Guy comes, million dollars.

Yeah.

19 years old.

Yeah, I trade some options. I had $30,000. You know, my dad took out a mortgage, blah, blah, blah. $30,000. I turned it into I forgot how much money you said, but it was like it was millions. Yeah. So then he's like, yeah, I paid off my dad's house. I paid this off. I pay that off. So what do you guys advise, like, for me to tell my bro? You give me advice. Every stock option I make, like, every trade I do, it's always the opposite. So when I was 23, I bet $2,000 on acad Pharmaceutical. Bought at a dollar. It was, like, super cheap, $2. And then it went to, like, $43.

You're rich.

Yeah.

I forget what it was. Something along those lines. Anyway, I turned that, like, $2,000 into 46,000. Yeah, something along those lines. So this is easy. This is great.

I was like, Why? Everybody's so rich?

Yeah.

Only time I ever make money on stock market. Every other time I lost, I put one snapchat. ipoed put one hundred k on snapchat. It was 34 right then. Literally, it jumped to 17. The very next day. I lost half of it just like that, overnight. And I held onto it forever. I was like, It's going to go up. But no, I ended up selling at 13, like, two years later.

That's crazy. It's impossible to tie in the market, but if you just keep it unless.

The company snapchat is worth $12 today.

Yeah, that's a little odd that it's now, but tech stocks have periods of relativity, right? It's tough with tech, but if you bought a business like a Target or an Apple or Apple's Contact, too, but a product or service, typical company like amd or I'm just naming off more tech companies actually.

Doing well.

Yeah, a lot of these companies, like hardware producers, they come up and they come down, but over time, ten years, they're solidly doing this.

Snapchat is kind of dead in the.

Water, but Snapchat is more of like it's kind of like a dead company. The only thing about tech stocks is that those companies can be they go to style, like old iphones. That's the biggest problem in the stock market. You got to pick bangers that are backed by real stuff. I've never actually did. I bought Tesla in 2015 or 16 or maybe something right around there. No, it's before royalty started. So it was like 14, and I had it in, like, $80, and I put $20,000 into it, and I kept it until about 130. And I always think I'm like, man, this company, this company, this company, because it never made sense to me that they don't make money, right? And people buy, and buy, and buy and buy. It is. And so my brother, my younger brother zack, he keeps investing money into, like, rivian and, like, all the other Tesla competitors. And I said, zach, listen, those companies legitimately are bad companies because A, they still don't make money, but B, they don't have a solid leader, and they rotate through ceos and leadership people all the time, and they're always moving around.

And these guys are getting paid tens of millions of dollars a year to be executives at these companies because they're living on Series A and Series B and all these rounds of funding. So if they're making that kind of money and they're jumping ship, I mean, what does that tell you about their company? He's always investing in these random companies, and and Tesla specifically is bought because of elon Musk.

Absolutely.

There's literally no other reason to buy Tesla. Honestly. Mario is buying.

He's an example. Yeah, elon tweets something.

Mario is like, I got to take your mood socks.

Tesla'S been red for seven days in a row. Still red.

I'm buying.

Complaints the next day. I lost so much money. Some more bitcoin the other day? About ten bitcoin.

Yeah.

At 31,000?

Yeah.

And what's it that today?

21,000.

Okay.

No, it's actually 22,400 at the time of this video.

Oh, okay.

So it's on a terror.

19,000.

It was $19,080 or something like that this morning. No, $19,980.

It's been a rough week for me, man. Down like, 200k.

Why?

Overall, I'm terrible at picking options. Do not choose what I choose. Whatever. I buy by lopis. If I sell, you buy. If I buy, you sell.

Can you post it on your Instagram? So let me know.

Own these pics.

Yeah, that's actually a really good plan. I would pay $20 a month to know your stock picks just so I could do the opposite. The thing is, that's what I love about the restaurant industry, right? Because in my opinion, everybody is always so pessimistic about the restaurant industry. But I think that's such an easy way to win, right? Everybody needs to eat.

If you treat it like a mom and pop store yes. It's the worst thing to do. My dad would always say, too, when he worked in Sweden.

We don't treat our restaurant like a restaurant.

No, we don't.

We treat our restaurant like a marketing company.

Yes.

Well, I treat it like a marketing company.

Right.

I build a brand, hhc, the first Texas hot chicken, the first of its kind, and we create a new type of food, essentially, right? I mean, we're frying chicken, but at the same time, we're way different than everybody else. We build a new trend, just like Princess did back with Nashville hot Chicken.

Right.

We're not really on the coattails of that. And that's why I was so worried about the only time that was legitimately, like, I don't know if I want to do this was when Edmund wanted to do Nashville hot Chicken. And so I just was like, should.

We talk about how it started?

I mean, we can a little bit, but the thing is that the key to our success is us being independent and unique, because we're the trendsetters in this new path is Texas hot chicken, right? I mean, you've got South Carolina barbecue, you've got Texas barbecue, virginia barbecue all have distinct flavors, right? So I actually spent some time in Maine, right? And there was a Carolina barbecue place in Maine, and they used a lot of vinegar.

Right.

It wasn't bad, but I wanted that sweet flavor. In Texas, everything felt like it was just sweet and just sweet and bold. It was bold, but it was like comfort food, almost.

Right.

Whereas the Caroline stuff was good. It was brisket and pork and everything, but it wasn't like I don't know, there's just something about that sweet teriyaki. Not teriyaki, but like that flavoring.

Like Pan Express.

Brown sugar. That's the flavor. Brown sugar I'm trying to think of.

Right?

Worst of Shire sauce, right? Isn't that sweet? I don't really know.

No, I don't eat that.

But anyways, those things, like, panda Express is my dream. Literally. I've met Andrew a handful of times, and he's literally like Jesus to me.

Andrew is the owner of panda?

Yeah.

He is, like, absolutely maniac when it comes to creating and running with something. He owns himself, like, 1500 restaurants.

Yeah, it's all his, right?

All of it is. He has owner operators like his managers, which I would love to do. We went the franchise route, but because when Papanda started, it was, like, the early 80s, right? There was no competition. No one really had money like that. Now, if you want to go get, like, a half a billion dollars, you literally can just call the neighbor next door. He knows a vc guy somewhere that's just sitting on $50 billion. Like, oh, yeah, I'll invest in that. Overnight, you have 50 stores. It's super easy to get money, which is another thing Houston saw. Chicken has no debt, which I love. I love that about this, right? Restaurants are the best business to be in in a recession, right? And if you look at chipotle's numbers, you'll see that. But that's what is so inspiring for us, is that we're going into a new world where all the fake phony guys that started their little mom and pop restaurants that they can compete with us, they're going to be edged out.

Nashville hot chicken. There's, like a hundred.

No more la. In La.

Every armenian owns a national hot chicken.

It's just like the tow truck thing.

Yeah. Right?

It's richie's. It's dave's. It's this, it's that.

It's funny. Why is that? No creativity in the armenian world.

I like to stand out from them.

If we had it at Vinceway, it had been Monday's. Hot chicken. That's a great name.

I still think we should change to that stand out.

Yeah.

Real stand out at these days.

We're going to make Monday's mediocre chicken.

No, that's a thing. That's a real thing. mmc. Is a real thing. Honestly, I've joked about it, but Edmund wanted his name on the restaurant so much, and I was like, Edmund, Monday sucks. And I told him I was going to lease a building in the ghetto and create monty's Mediocre Chicken that's always frozen, never fresh, literally the worst tasting hot chicken around. I'm going to use all these slogans.

I just need one picture of that on my Instagram.

And you send it to your family in amenia.

Oh, my God. He made it. He made it.

Yeah.

That'D be great.

Yeah.

I promise you. The funny thing is that restaurant crank.

I know it will, because it'll be.

The cheapest food out there.

It's got my name behind it.

Yeah.

But it'll also be, like, the cheapest food out there. Like, I'll use that prison bread raising canes.

Right?

$7 frozen chicken.

Four pieces of chicken.

Seven chicken. Tiny little like, 1oz people eat it.

And they eat it. Like, lines of people eat that right. And like, all your employees, you see.

It until they tried our food, remember that correct.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I had one employee that ate raising canes almost three times a day.

Through Andre. No, Andre used to Darren. Okay.

You know, he met him at the movies. Yeah, Darren, he has, like, a punch card with like 800 meals on it.

That's crazy.

It's probably way more now because it's been a long time since we talked about that. But he loved it. And I didn't hate Canes.

Right.

It's hard to hate chicken.

It's good.

Once I learned about chicken and how it works, I haven't eaten chicken anywhere else since.

Yeah.

So let's touch on a couple of points today. So Nashville Hot Chicken is salty and spicy.

It's not good. cumin is a very they're not all cumin.

Some specific ones are cumin, especially the La. Based ones are cumin.

Okay.

I haven't had princes.

Okay.

I can only imagine that it just a bunch of cayenne pepper.

Princes is good.

Okay.

So when I went to Nashville, I went to Princess because the original ones, I want to try to see what everyone else is trying to replicate.

Right.

You always go to the original. So when we started Houston's House Chicken, when we chose the name Houston's Hot Chicken yes, it's his name purpose was Texas.

Yeah, that's the purpose.

We figured. Obviously, it was my idea and my recipe, so I wanted to be my name. But when he proposed Houston's Hot Chicken, I was like, you know what? That has a better ring. And when we go to places like Tokyo, Japan, right. Anywhere in Europe, anywhere outside of the United States, houston's has a Texas ring to it. And people know that food in Texas is delicious.

Right. Of course.

People love American culture outside of the United States. I mean, they love it here, too, even. It's more so outside of the United States. So for that reason, Houston's Hot Chicken, you got the name. Because we're thinking bigger picture. When we decided on the name Houston's, we thought about Houston, Texas. How do we make it taste kind of texan and different from everyone else? Because the problem is, with Nashville Hot Chicken, it's like they're all literally copies of each other. That's all it is. And they're all going for that cartoon look, pretty childish look.

Literally like okay, so it's very simple. I mean, dave's Holland raises first. Obviously, we know the story.

Okay, so it's princes. Funny story if you guys don't know how they started, how hot chicken started.

Right.

So it's a black couple in Nashville, Tennessee. Husband cheats on the wife. The husband cheats on the wife. Wife gets like, super pissed off. I'm going to burn his ass tonight.

Right.

He loves chicken. So she decides to make the chicken really spicy. Like, puts a bunch of peppers in and his mouth is going to burn. He's going to struggle. But he's learning lesson. They'll never tell me again. So husband eats it and he loves the foods. I love this shit. Why has no one ever thought of making chicken spicy, right? So then they started prince's Hot Chicken, and from there, heady bees copied them. And then some other copied heady bees over there. And then howlin reyes was the first one in La Holland. ray's copied hatty bees. And then the guys from dave's copied howland Ray Hall and ray's grand opening video that's on YouTube. You see the guys, the founders of Dave. Founders of dave's in the background, like, taking a selfie with, like, the chicken. And then dave's. The guys from dave's, I know a couple of them, they're arminian. And then every arminian saw their success. Their success, right. And decided to just follow the trend.

Right.

So they all essentially just copied each other down the line. We were supposed to buy a la company, okay? We went there. I had met them. You came. We were supposed to do this. Houston and I own 50%. They were gonna own 50%. The deal just didn't work out.

Right.

We didn't like them as business partners. They were younger kids, younger armenian kids, you know, early 20s, like 21. No business sense. They just, like, landed on this really hot thing. That was hot chicken, right at the time. It was a golden egg making a lot of money. And they kind of just, like, lost focus because they thought anything to do with business is going to be this easy.

Right.

But we've struggled 1415 years building different businesses. We understand that once you have something that's really hot, like, hold on to your full focus on that. So some of the guys, those guys were trying to weed pokey and hospice and all burritos. Yeah, just all over the place. We decided to do our own. It was our social media presence, our business skill mindset, and all of our experience. We realized that we can start something really big by ourselves. So we started this brand, Houston's Hot Chicken, and we decided to make the recipe different from everyone else.

We want to stand out, honestly, inadvertently. It worked well. It works so well because we were meant to have it different, even if we didn't want to have it different. What we created was so different. It's kind of astounding to me, honestly, how looking back at when we started this, a year before a restaurant opened.

Right.

That's why I mean, I'm so fat. So I stopped eating the fried food. And that's the reason why we created the caesar salad, because that's, like, my favorite food. And we obviously made our own special sauce, our own special caesar. You kind of call it like I don't really know. It's like a hot caesar salad. It's like crazy spicy Texas season. Yeah, it's an amazing salad. And I eat that now, so I get a little bit of diversity. But every time I have a sandwich, I actually want to eat it, like, the next day.

Right.

There's a little bit that is sentimental to me with our restaurant, but legitimately, it is just really good. My wife will order it on Uber Eats. That's how good it is.

Houston and I, we have, like, a little salad war going on.

Yeah, your stupid Southwest salad that's all trash.

Better than your stupid season.

I don't like cottage cheese, and it's got cottage cheese on it.

Tia cheese, mangoes, which goes so well with something spicy. Spicy chicken with mangoes. And then we got a bean relish. It's just so much better if your season salad.

The reason his salad is actually good is because of the cilantro dressing mixed with our it's mixed with our house sauce, and it makes such a good flavor pairing with the chicken and the lettuce and everything.

So, like, you would say, it's better than the caesar.

No, it's not better. It's also good. If we took all the rest of the toppings off. If it was chicken, lettuce and the dressing, it'd be fire. I honestly wanted to make a sandwich with that dressing on it.

That would be good. You know what? I'll try that up tomorrow.

Yeah.

And maybe, like, some tacos.

Stick to what we're doing.

These hot chicken tacos, man.

So I've been grilling a lot, and I can't wait, like, 20 years when we're done with this, using hot chicken. Whenever we sell this company, you can.

Open a steak house.

Yeah, like, the best of the best.

I'm going to open three businesses after houston's hot chicken. I'm going to do a very unique taco restaurant that I've told you about. I'm doing the most ridiculous expensive, absolutely wild Italian restaurant in all of Las Vegas. My average ticket has to be $1,000. Like, 1520 tables max. I want the most crazy shit white truffles every day of the year. I'm going to find out how to do it. Playing in the white truffles every day.

We have them plant them on the mood.

Yeah.

And then I would love to have a burger restaurant in the same similar fashion as houston's hot chicken, because I don't think anybody really does burgers that well. That's, like, high end. I think there's a lot of great burger places. Yeah, like your steak house with the wagu meats and the blends and all that stuff, and the real wild. I mean, I went to a Japanese barbecue place recently, and it was the most expensive meal I think I've ever had.

Which was it?

I mean, it was, like, $6,000. Do we want to tell everybody that?

I mean, we had $8,000.01.

No, there was four people. $6,000.

Never mind.

Each slice of meat was, like, the thinnest you could see, and it was, like, this big. And there are $15 apiece, and I must have ate, like, a hundred of them.

Thanks for the invite.

You know you want me and julius did.

I really haven't replaced you.

You've actually been to this restaurant, didn't you? Go. I took Mario. Oh, I took Mario to this restaurant.

Mario won twelve. I've been double replaced. savannah, when I'm going to cancel mario's car. Mario is opening up houston's hot chicken with us. He loves the brand, he's selling all his Tesla stocks and he's going to open up. But I'm going to cancel in Mario. Looks like pick my spot.

I'll take it.

This place.

My point was that there's really no premium burger restaurant, right. That's above in an outer shake shack similar to houston's hot chicken, but in the level of space.

Right.

And I think that there's really a need for that. Real high end.

Maybe we cut this part out not to give people ideas. So ten years from now it's still relevant.

You guys could open up 100 restaurants with the exact same idea as me, and you're not going to beat me. I was watching, I promise. Okay.

I was watching this documentary on rolex.

Can you compete with rolex?

No.

So the guy said, you can make any brand successful with the right marketing directly from the founder.

Do you remember the Aston Martin ad for their used cars?

No, what was it?

It's like the most impactful ad I've ever seen. And it shows a woman basically half naked, right. And it says, you know, you weren't the first, but do you really care?

Wow.

And she's like, yeah, wow, that's great. It's for used Aston Martin. I love that. I was like ten maybe when I saw that. And I remember I can see the entire magazine page.

That's amazing.

It was in. It's a beautiful ad.

That is genius.

You know, you weren't the first, but does it really matter, right? Aston Martin is the worst car ever created from like, sports cars. Most unreliable, the most lackluster, the slowest, highest horsepower cars ever. I actually watched a review from Mr. jw on the v twelve vantage, and even he was like, trying his best to give it compliments. Brand new 2022 vantage V twelve advantage, right? He was trying to give it compliments and he couldn't literally, he was trying he was everything he could have done. Car is beautiful, looks amazing.

Yeah.

But $350,000 700 hp crap car, james Bond. But they have the best marketing. That brand is epic. James Bond was the number one, obviously the number one thing for Aston Martin, right, was that secret agent. This is the car for the secret agent.

Right.

You have obviously the sex appeal ads.

Where did the gentleman, it was the gentleman's car.

It's never lost that. No matter how much it goes, no matter how crappy it was, the vanquish, it's still the car, right? Like, I've even looked at buying them from like six and five, I'm like, oh, I need one of those because I want to feel like a seven secret agent. And the point you're making is correct. The product is junk. It's just the brand and what it stands for.

Right.

So that's why houston's hot chicken is so good. The product is amazing.

It really is. But we were the number one restaurant. 2021. People love when I say love, I mean they love our food. They love our food. They'll come for lunch, dinner, Monday through.

Sunday, read the reviews, they're paragraph long. It's great. So when you're talking about building brands, you've got to be very careful about different cultures, different areas. And I think that with houston's Hot Chicken over the Nashville style Hot Chicken because of that cartoony look, I think that that cartoony look has an expiration date. And I've been kind of saying that for a long time. And you have this La street art, right? And most of these chicken places have built an entire image around it. I mean, you have the Angry chicks that has like the dapping Chicken as a logo. I just totally feel like that's not relevant anymore. It's not very gimmicky. It's very gimmicky. They've built an entire business around a gimmick. So when you go and you branch into Salt Lake City, very conservative area, obviously very religious, even the south, right, the Bible Belt, what they call it, how is a company that's very La street art going to succeed there? No matter how good your food is or bad the food is, it's the brand that's the best. I mean, a great example is our franchisee in the United Kingdom, in Wales, who I'm talking to right now, showed me an article written about chickfila.

chickfila. You guys think chickfila. Oh my God, chickfila. chickfila. chickfila. They never fail.

This.

Chickfila was open for 90 days and they shut it down. They were getting so many people out there protesting and all this stuff. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the owner of chickfila is like wildly religious. It's very offensive. And he blatantly offends all the different groups of people that don't fall in line with his religion.

Right.

And you know that right now, the current people that are being offended is the LG. I can't say that word. But yeah, that sector which houston's Hot Chicken obviously supports because if you haven't seen edmund but we watch this go down, like in history where a brand defines itself against a cultural movement, right? And no matter how strong they are, no matter how good their food is, how good their sales are, people have they feel disrespected, of course, right. And so in the UK, in Manchester, where they opened, it was obviously shunned upon and they lasted 90 days.

Chickfila people were picketing outside and getting closed. Anyway, let's get back to our brand.

I mean, we're talking about brands.

We were talking about this was the most disgusting thing that I've ever seen. How they kill chickens.

I didn't want to cry today.

It's so sad, actually. Very disturbing and sad. So there's a belt with hooks on it. They'll grab a chicken, they'll hang them on the hooks with their feet so upside down. And then the belt moves along. There's like a small little pool of water that's electrocuted. There's like electricity running through there. So the chicken, its neck hits the water, gets electrocuted, which knocks them out. Knocks them out. But they tense up.

Right.

And the chicken is already upside down. It's like flapping, which is why you'll see red blood vessels in some chicken.

Man, if you bite in the chicken, it's tough.

After that, they cut the drug dealer off and then they let it bleed out. And then, because salmonella could spread among.

Chicken, not only that, the body temperature is warm.

So this is a part.

Yeah, but the reason they put them in that water is because they need to cool them down.

I know.

Yeah.

So they put them in cold water to cool down the body temperature so they can process the meat. Because salmonella can also spread among chickens when they're in the same pool of water. There's a chlorine concentration in that pool of water that's 40 times higher than a public pool. And a public pool is the most disgusting place in the world.

Open your eyes under a public pool and you can't see for 6 hours.

After your eyes burn.

Your eyes burn. Imagine 40 times that.

Yeah.

So that's why most chicken is bleached. It's white, right? All pink.

90%, probably more than that.

Like most five most commodity chicken is. So what we use, we wanted to stick away from that. So basically when we started this brand, houston and I, we already had money, we already had successful businesses. I wanted to make a fast place, like a fast casual restaurant that I myself could go eat to. I like to eat clean and healthy.

Right.

I no longer wanted to eat at the place with frozen chicken.

Yeah, me neither.

Blah, blah, blah. I want clean, good food. So that was our idea behind this. So because of that, we didn't really.

Know also the process of chicken.

Yeah, I had no idea.

We literally had no idea.

I wanted organic chicken.

That's exactly right. So we basically agreed that we were going to use the highest end product possible. And we go to like, cisco Us Foods and all these places, and we go there and we sample all of their food. And it wasn't good, actually, for the funny stuff. I remember that time when we went to Us Foods and I was like, in the bathroom puking. It was so bad.

Handle spice. Yeah, but it was business.

It was gross. And so we decided on using Mary's organic chicken, the same stuff that you find at Whole Foods, which is it's the cream of the crop.

I mean, it's air chilled.

Very different. Explain this one.

So instead of hanging them, hanging the chickens upside down. They go in this room that has.

A low oxygen environment, so they just pass out.

There's no stress on the chicken, no blood vessels that pop. The meat does not tense up. The muscles don't tense up. So it's very soft and very humane.

Also, of course, because think the electrocuted chickens, not all of them get electrocuted.

Yeah.

So not only are they on the belt for, like, 30 seconds a minute freaking out, right. Some don't get electrocuted, and then their.

Heads just get chopped off while they're alive.

Yeah.

So terrible. It's it's really sad.

Commodities. 40 million. That's just one farm. Yeah, 40 million a week. Anyway, let's not talk about that.

And Mary's, when they go through this low oxygen environment, they pass out. They pass out completely, and they get killed.

Cut the jugular while they're completely yeah. And then after that, they get air chilled. So when you hear about air chilled chicken, it's not in this chlorine concentration.

Right.

So they get an inside refrigerator, so it costs a lot more, as opposed to just tossing them in like, a pool of water.

There's no cross contamination, and there's no risk of getting bad chicken bacteria or anything because they're not in a pool.

Your body is also not consuming chlorine chicken. Like, how disgusting is that? You want to eat chicken. You want clean meat. You're taking on all these chemicals without knowing it. So marriage chicken is pink, it's soft, it's juicy, it's delicious. It is the most expensive chicken out on the market, and that's the one we buy. That's the only one we serve at houston's Hot Chicken.

And we managed to do this with a $10 sandwich price point. I don't know if you guys look at prices, but the majority of fast food now, I mean, really fast food, you're looking at $7 for a sandwich at McDonald's.

Okay?

Inflation has hit everybody.

Okay?

Now, we have managed to get you a million times better quality food and keep the price point at $10.

And our margins are still great at 28%.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to push them up a little bit to 33 so that.

We get there once the price of chicken and price of ingredients and everything else comes down. But right now, 27%, when you compare that to, like, a popeyes, they're 14%.

And it's funny because most like a Del Taco, they're 12%.

Right.

What was weiner's Central was like in the low teens? Yeah, it was like 11% or 10%. And you're looking at the biggest businesses in the world that have supply chains that are so fine tuned and locked down. Every penny is accounted for.

Right.

We have a very early business. Our supply chains are good, but they're going to get so much better. We're going to be able to fine tune things. Once we have 100 stores open, everything is going to change. So right now, we're managing to be exceptionally profitable. Our restaurants are doing three and a half to $4 million a year, and we're running a 30% profit by 28% profit margin right now. So just do simple math. I mean, that's what a corporate store does. And obviously, if you're doing a franchise store, our franchise fees start out at six and a half percent. And if you buy more than five, you get a four and a half percent based franchise fee. And then there's a couple of advertising points in there, but points for that. Yeah.

Six and a half points.

If they're doing 50% of what a corporate store does, which is $1.9 million, you're literally netting in the $50,000 $40,000 range, which is phenomenal. It's absolutely phenomenal. Honestly, I had no idea that businesses made that kind of money with that little investment.

If you run them.

Right.

And it's not just that we're not selling a $4 popeye chicken sandwich, right? We're selling a $10 chicken sandwich.

Well, popeye is like $6.

Yeah, well, not $6. So because we went higher rent, we were able to charge more.

Right.

And our profit margins I'm better yeah.

Well, also, our employees, our base rate of pay, including tips and everything, is around $20.

So it'd be working for us. We have nobody that quits houston's hot chicken. I always say it it's a vibe when you go inside, it's so different than any other restaurant. It's like the perfect hangout spot for teens.

Can you just, like, say thank you to Houston for that?

Yeah.

Thank you. You made the recipe. I admit it. I didn't have anything to do with that. Chicken sandwich shoes.

You chose the wood, everything.

I chose the environment.

What environment? I chose the lights.

What are you talking about?

It's all about lighting package. Oh, my God. This goes back to my towing days, right. When we started with the towing, the.

Music, the lights, the art we agreed on, luckily all right.

The tables.

The countertops. Were you thank you.

Yeah.

That's the coolest part about the restaurant. When people walk in, they're like, holy.

Shit, you have red counters.

Wow.

Anyways, the vibe. Listen, at the end of the day, as much as me and edmund try to take credit for it, we literally.

Did this business 50 50 together.

We agree on, like, that's why I I created this cool hypercar one time, and then edmund added, like, a little fin in the back, was like, yeah, that's my idea. His whole car now, because we agreed on the entire design in the beginning.

So your car did not have canards. Your car did not have louvers. It doesn't have that car has no aerodynamic.

His version of it does. Mine doesn't.

Okay.

All right. So thanks to the chicken restaurant the.

Chicken restaurant doesn't have any canards either.

Yeah, but it has great food. So we franchise over 100 locations. I have another 130 on the table. I'm negotiating deals on over 100 franchises sold. We're moving into a couple of new countries. Can't see him yet. Deal is not done.

Where are you going? Two weeks. He's going to Egypt. He's got a big deal happening in Egypt. Middle east.

Really?

It's a guy that wants to take the majority of the Middle East.

Egypt, Dubai, Qatar.

I mean, there's only four really dope places in the Middle East. anyways, my point is that business over there is going to be phenomenal.

Doing 150 store deal just in the Middle East with this guy. So that's big.

Yeah, it's so big. I mean, it has to go there. I refuse to get on an airplane right now, but you can go.

I don't mind. I'm taking a vacation.

Yeah, he's getting a month off, essentially. Ten days working, ten days vacation, probably extending another ten days because you're there.

Then I'm going to Germany. My cousin's wedding is there. Then I'm going to mykonos Central Pay and some other places that I haven't decided on yet.

Nice.

It's for work.

Yeah.

I'm actually going to send you a couple of addresses to look at because I got some nice houses in Lake.

Como that I want to get beautiful. I support that 100%.

I went into escrow today on that cheap house I was telling you about.

Congratulations.

It's not a congratulations. It's like, I'm going to like instead of like, one big $8 million house, I'm trying to get four $2 million houses.

I'm so sorry, you can't live in a 20,000 square foot house anymore.

I can what are you talking about?

House like normal people. I'm so sorry.

I can live in that house. But my wife is, like, the opposite of me. I'm, like, very pretentious and very frugal. Yeah, it's funny because early when I had her in my video, she's like, oh, gold digger, gold digger. I thought it was so funny. I showed her these pictures or these comments that she called her a gold digger. I mean, I've been with my wife when I was 20 years old. Yeah. Our first date was in my $800 truck that she drove me in because I was trying to test it, see if she would be upset that I didn't have any money.

Right.

I mean, I had enough money to pay for dinner and my rent. I mean, I was never broke, but now I'm like the opposite of that. And I just like to spend it on frivolous things that I don't need, like a very large house. But since this whole restaurant business, I've just been wanting to get more diversity, different places. Yeah. I want to open the corporate market in Hawaii.

Right.

I love Hawaii. I used to go there every month for a week, every single month for five days, not a week. And then the pandemic happens, and the politics there are complicated, and I haven't been back yet, but I would think maybe getting a couple of million. A nice house there, nice house in Europe somewhere. And maybe a nice house in Florida.

Right?

Because I think we deserve to have the Florida market as a corporate market, at least. South Florida what we were looking at southeast.

We can do southwest. We've sold.

We already sold Tampa. I haven't been to Tampa, so I don't really know if it's nice. Is it cool?

It's okay.

That's where you're building your houses, right?

St. petersburg? No. Cape. Coral labelle.

How far is that from Tampa?

The high acres? It's about, like, 200 miles south. Tampa sebring and then us.

Got it.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that we should get at least we should definitely do one Europe corporate area.

Right?

Honestly, I would love to do Geneva. Switzerland is so beautiful. Italy would be great. Anywhere in Rome. But I think what would be really cool, obviously, we start in the UK. Paris would be phenomenal. I mean, the density in Paris is absolutely crazy.

Yes.

Peruvians.

No, parisians. peruvian.

Okay.

When did peru go to Paris?

He don't like spicy food, so I don't know how it'll do over there, but Paris is very diverse now. There's a huge Middle East crust. It'll do well.

There's, what, 20 million people in Paris? Yeah, 16 million, something like that. Paris is one of the biggest cities in the world.

Only like 2 million are French now. The rest are all immigrants.

Everywhere else. Yeah, the UK would smack, of course, Ireland. And then obviously we can go down to Portugal, right? I have a franchisee in Portugal I've been talking to in marbella, Spain, somewhere. Obviously, the Spanish love spice, so I just feel like when we're over here in America, the States, California, Nevada, you know, we have Utah, Arizona, we're all within 35, 40 minutes of each other. We can hit the European market in the same sense.

Right?

I mean, you're 35, 40 minutes from massive, major European metropolitan areas that are, like, super easy to get to.

The world is a very big place.

It is.

We're in the small little nut over here in the shell, the Us. And we think this is all it is.

But yeah, so that's why I'm trying to, like I'm not trying to downsize. I'm just trying to diversify for the better of our company, too, because we can't open a corporate area without one of us there, and I'd rather have both of us there. I think once we solidify the Vegas market, we have nine current stores under construction out of the eleven that are here. And it's tough to do construction with that many projects at one time.

It is.

I mean, we have three contractors, and we have 28,000 just fryers and whatever tables and different sandwich prep stuff.

The biggest issue right now is the shortage of supplies.

Acs.

Yeah, acs. The fires that we use, we use very specific fires. And the best of the best. These fires are on an eleven month wait right now. So it was nine months a few months ago, but now it's eleven months.

$500,000 on fryers. Like three or four months ago, right.

$500,000 for the French fried fryers, 500k for the chicken fryers.

Yeah, well we already had half of them coming in just to order. Replaced it three months ago with five.

Hundred K. Now we're ahead of the curve.

We're prepared to open the stores that.

We have and a lot of franchisee stores. So we're always keeping a rotation of 20 stores, equipment for 20 stores. So that's why we have a massive warehouse, 20,000 sqft. Back there just filled with kitchen equipment.

And give them the address.

I just fucked up, you probably figured out, right, just like follow our Instagram pages like, shit, I just love talking. Don't do that.

Listen, if you're going to break in, bring a forklift.

That's just heavy.

It is heavy. Bring like 20 guys building a massive, massive brand. At the beginning we thought this was going to be like a 50 store, 100 store deal, right? Like we're going to build like 100 stores, maybe sell the company. But I think as soon as we open up the first one, we realized how big it's going to be. And now we realize this business is going to be around for a generation or two. So I sold everything else. I'm out of real estate, I'm out of oil, I'm out of everything. I'm just fully focusing on this business because this is the one that I can confidently say is going to make us both billionaires.

I don't want to say it's guaranteed because nothing's guaranteed, but there's nothing I'm more confident in than this business. It's, it's like the writing's on the wall. I mean, it's simple and it's, it's easy to go from one city to the next and, and really be confident that the people there are going to love it.

Right.

Las Vegas is a phenomenal place for us to start because we have everybody. I mean, there's 40 million people on average visit Las Vegas, right. And like Josh jacobs from the Raiders, for instance. Right? He's from Alabama, or he went to school in Alabama. I think he's from Oklahoma. But he came to our grand opening and we do business with him at royalty. So he came to our grand opening and he's got half the damn Raiders trying to buy franchise now. He's so passionate about the restaurant.

Right.

And I really didn't expect that. I knew we had a good business, right. But I didn't expect people to live and breathe. This. One of my friends, manny, he has a handful of smoke shops in town. I swear to you. He eats it 45 to 50 times a month. I'm not kidding. That's a real number. He eats it at least every day for sure. But sometimes twice a day. I think he's going to have some health problems. Honestly, he eats too much chicken.

I was talking to my cousin about this, and I told him exactly. I said, I knew it was going to be successful, but I had no idea it was going to be this successful. So when he told me, he's kind of like a stupid analogy, but he's like, look, every single car you and Houston have bought, your Mercy, you made it the coolest mercer log in the world.

Right?

Your gt? Three Rs. You made it the coolest gt. Three Rs. Your ff was the coolest ff in the world.

Don't forget about that mercy. You should say that twice. The only red one ever made.

Yeah.

Only red one ever made on Houston pot. But everything I've touched, the towing business, it was the best. So the five that I had in all of Southern California, there's over 500 locations, contractors with triple A. I had five. I had three of the top five in the entire state. So out of the 503 of mine were in the top five, I had two. I have number one, number two, and the number five spot in all of.

Who was three and four?

I don't know, someone else.

We should have beat that dude.

Well, yeah, one of them was just for heavy rigs.

Yeah.

So heavy towing. So I couldn't have got that one anyway. Even the towing, I perfected it, right? I made it really freaking good. The real estate business, really good. royalty, you have the biggest exotic rental car company in the entire freaking country or the world, right? This is the standard. royalty is the standard. So my towing company was The Standard, right? So with hot chicken we are going to be the standard.

I think we already are The Standard.

Chicken, and everyone else is going to start coughing us. From now on, we'll be known as The Originals.

So we're definitely the originals of Texas Hot chicken. But I know that we're The Standard already, because if you look at our consistency in our numbers, we have this app called placer, right? So it's very simple to look at anybody's traffic. And I'm very well versed in competitor knowledge. That makes sense if you want to call them that. And everybody that opens up a hot chicken place and I check Los Angeles, I check Las Vegas, I check everywhere, right? Anywhere. We're going into different markets. I really pay attention to that stuff. And a lot of the big guys well, there's only one big guy, right? They open busier than shit. Oh, my gosh. This place is like printing money. Busy. It's like crazy. And then four months later, it's 100% dead. What tells me is they don't have repeat customers, right? Everybody wants to try something new. It's called the honeymoon stage, right? Just like when you get a new girl, you're all about it every day. You're talking to her, talking to her, talking to.

Her.

Then like three months go by and you're like, you know, I don't really like you anymore. And that's what happens to a lot of almost every restaurant, right? And so just like the togos that open next door to us, when their first day, when they opened in one of our greenland, I went there. I was like, oh, I can't wait to have a sandwich. And I haven't been back since, right? The sandwich is fine. It wasn't bad, but when the line was out the door, it enticed me to go. I was like, wow, I got to try this place. This place is going to be good. And I swear to you that togos hasn't seen more than two people in the restaurant since it's opened on his first day.

Once we opened in the Plaza, we just took all the customers. And anytime you go to rubio's now, there's like two people in the dining room and you go to houston's, hot chickens, easy.

And it's a different type of success, right? And it's cool, it's trendy, it's hot.

It'S only getting better.

I love talking about this business because I just get so excited. We could talk for another 2 hours about it because I want to talk about the intricacies, right? And I'm going to announce an amazing partnership soon, next couple of weeks that I'm so excited for. I've met a lot of great people living in Las Vegas that lived here my whole life. And Las Vegas brings so much talent to the city because it's very advantageous to live here. edmund and I have been working on some massive deals with some big celebrities and some people that are really influential that I think will help us, that share the same passion as us, will help us grow. I mean, Josh jacobs is one of them and there's a couple more. And so we could wrap this podcast up because I want to continue this and get people excited and I want people to subscribe and really be a part of this business. And that's why we're talking about it, because we want to share that this is not our business, right? I mean, realistically, I know that everybody can't do that, but we franchise and you guys can just hit us up.

We go on our website and fill out a franchise inquiry. You could be a part of it too. You could be a part of the success. And we're very transparent. We send all our numbers, we send all of our information. nothing's off the table, right? That's why we're heading in the right direction.

This guy franchisee called me a little and he's like, don't eat, sign an nda. I was like, no bro, our numbers are really good. We're an open book. I have nothing yet.

Our numbers are good.

I'm sending my toast report right now.

Honestly, I kind of want to post them publicly. It's a little bit of show off, but it's also like, I want to prove that this is real. There's a lot of people out there that are struggling, and I get it, and I'm sorry for that, but we're not. And we're really trying to entice everybody to come join our team because we're only going to grow together.

And I would love nothing more than to grow with some of our followers.

Oh, yeah.

Because they're the best people. Partially.

Six of our franchisees are subscribers.

Yeah.

Subscribers. That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

And it's only growing because the more we talk about this, the more we interest people.