Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1583 - John Terzian & Craig Susser
Uploaded: 2020-12-24T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1583 - John Terzian & Craig Susser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1583 - John Terzian & Craig Susser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1583 - John Terzian & Craig Susser

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
So, gentlemen, let's start, just introduce yourself.
John, introduce yourself, tell people what you do.
I'm John Terzian, I own a company called H. Wood Group.
So we have restaurants, nightclubs, Delilah, Nice Guy, Bootsy Bellows are some
of them.
And Craig?
I'm Craig Susser.
I got to feel like such a slacker compared to that.
Yeah, you should.
I own a place called Craig's Restaurant and a vegan ice cream company called
Craig's Vegan.
A place called Craig's, very modest.
It's one of the best restaurants in LA.
Very highly respected place.
And we're here to talk about what the fuck is happening to the restaurant
industry during this pandemic and how crazy it is.
You know, I've talked about this before, but having you guys on so you could
say firsthand what it's been like to you and what this experience has been like
and how poorly it's been handled, just I want to give people a sense of this at
home, what it's like from two men who have made their living in the hospitality
and restaurant industry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you want to start, Craig?
Well, no.
The funny thing is, it's like we're the rule followers.
Yeah.
We're the ones that are used to handling the health department.
We're the ones that are used to, you know, doing everything that, you know,
from a safety standpoint.
Right.
And now we're the ones that are being crushed or being picked on, so to speak,
by that's the way a lot of people in the industry feel, because we're the ones
that are being shut down in a city where a lot of other businesses are
remaining open, like malls, distribution centers, markets.
Stores.
I mean, you can go to a mall and go shopping.
You can go on an airplane from L.A. to, you know, New York, take your mask off
and eat, and that's okay.
But you can't eat outdoors in a restaurant in L.A. that's following social
distancing, all the health guidelines.
I mean, we know our business.
And so it's been really hard since, what, it started March 15th.
We shut down.
We were then told to put glass in between our boots, so we did that.
We opened for about 10 days.
We did UV lights in the air conditioning systems.
Air filtration, all the stupe, everything.
Absolutely.
And then we built patios.
I personally spent $250,000 abiding by the rules that were set forth by the
state, by the county, by the governors, by everybody.
And then to just kind of be shut down is really, really difficult.
And it's not about me, and it's not about my restaurant, and it's not about
John.
It's not about, it's about the employees.
It's about the dishwashers and the busboys and the servers that live day to day
on the money that they make at the restaurant.
It's their livelihood.
It's how they feed their families.
They send money back to the countries that they came from, you know.
This is a larger issue.
And the reason it's a larger issue is one little restaurant like Craig's, we
have 90 employees.
A furniture store might have five or six.
So when you shut down an industry like that, it really has a huge economic
impact.
And then it has a social impact because we all love to eat.
It's the one thing we have in common.
We like to get together as people.
I'm a giant fan of restaurants.
I mean, it's one of my favorite things to do is to go out to eat.
And living in L.A., it was so frustrating.
It was bizarre.
It doesn't make sense.
Now, when you guys get the orders, when they tell you what's shut down or what's
open, is there anyone you communicate with?
Is there anyone that's involved in government that you've had conversations
with?
No, that's the issue.
That's the biggest issue that we have is they refuse to communicate to any of
us.
And I can't quite figure out why.
We hear about it on the news.
We've joined with about 40, 30, 40 other main owners that are all in the area.
And I think it's the one thing that's kind of a silver lining in all this is
that we've all teamed up to kind of like try to figure out what's going on.
But we find out about it from the news, and we have to just make these moves
within 24 hours.
It's absolutely absurd.
And we've reached out.
I've reached out to Newsom.
I've reached out to Garcetti, and they do nothing.
You know, they put you on phony task force.
They lie.
You know, they have no idea how serious this is.
And I commend you for having us on.
No one else wants to speak about it.
Everyone's too scared of backlash.
Well, what backlash?
I don't think they understand that L.A. is crumbling.
Yeah, I think people are thinking it's black and white.
If you say anything somewhat negative, they view you as you're anti-COVID.
You're wanting to kill everybody, and that's not the case.
You're a science denier.
Yeah, that's not the case.
But that's not the issue.
So we're not denying that there's an issue.
We're not denying that people are getting sick.
We're not denying that there are – we all are in this together.
So how do you do it well?
How do you do it smartly?
Where should we be spending money?
A perfect example is they're doing rapid testing in certain areas.
So instead of losing all of this revenue, why don't they invest in smart
technology that has rapid testing that allows people to go to a restaurant, get
a rapid test, you're positive, you're negative, and then you get to go into the
restaurant.
Look what we did here today.
Exactly.
We got rapid testing today.
Everyone's fine.
We can sit down and have a conversation, have no paranoia.
You could do that at a restaurant.
You could have the – I was telling you about Stubbs Barbecue here in Austin
where Dave Chappelle and I have been doing shows.
Great establishment.
We do 400 seats.
We test everyone.
People get there way in advance.
They test them.
They get a COVID test, which gives them a nice peace of mind like, oh, great, I
don't have it.
Then you get to sit down and enjoy a show, and the place is packed.
And so the business is making money.
Everyone's having a good time.
It's possible.
Well, that's what a lot of people are doing in LA, right?
So they're having parties in LA, and a lot of them are doing rapid testing
beforehand so everybody gets a wristband and everybody in the party knows that
everybody's negative.
But isn't the mayor threatening to shut those kind of parties down?
He's threatening to shut water off.
Yeah.
And power.
And by the way, he's done it.
Yeah, water and power, which we're living in like a dictatorship.
I literally feel like LA is like a third world country right now.
Never seen anything like this.
Well, if you go to Venice or you go to downtown LA and you see the encampments,
it's fucking bananas.
Yeah.
I mean, third world countries wouldn't allow that shit.
It's worse.
This is some sort of dictatorship happening that to me is a bigger picture.
If other governments, if other states, counties, cities see that they can just
shut an industry down so easily, get a name for themselves, get their name out
there, what's stopping everyone else from doing this?
Exactly.
It's new power.
So here's Venice Beach.
Look at this video.
This is, I mean, this is very mild in comparison to some of the videos that I've
seen.
Yeah.
But there's one from downtown LA that literally, so Venice Beach, all the boardwalk,
that whole area is now just encampments.
Well, yeah, like Wilshire and San Vicente, it's pretty bad, right?
It's terrible.
Yeah, I've seen that.
Wilshire and San Vicente is bad.
Downtown LA is absolutely the worst.
Downtown LA is bananas.
Thousands and thousands of tents.
And I don't know how they're going to put that genie back in the bottle.
Now you've got, they're trying to clean up because they're trying to like, oh,
this is a health hazard.
You've got like human shit in the streets.
Like, how do we clean this?
So they're trying to clean up.
Right.
And now activists are stopping them from cleaning up.
They're like, your actions are violence.
And they're holding hands and blocking cleanup crews.
But think about how many more people you've just added to the homeless roles
because of all the industries that have been shut down.
Yeah.
And people that can't feed their families.
Yeah.
That's the hard part.
It's like, you know, John, we all know the same people.
And I actually, in my heart of hearts, think that they believe that they're
helping.
That's my belief.
That's cute.
And I disagree with that.
I disagree.
Wholeheartedly.
I know that.
But I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That doesn't mean I agree with them or agree with what they're doing in the
least.
But I will give a shout out to like the city of West Hollywood, the mayor,
Lindsay Voharveth, Paul Aravalo.
They have been so business friendly.
They're trying to help as much as they can.
The permits, the ability for me to get my patio up and running, they moved in
lightning speed.
But I'll give you an example.
I got the front patio built.
It finished on a Friday.
And on Saturday, I got shut down.
That's worthless.
So what did I just spend?
60 grand.
There's no evidence that shows that outdoor dining is contributing
significantly to the
COVID spread.
There's no evidence.
They actually had to admit that finally.
In court, the county has no evidence of a nexus between any sort of outbreak
with outdoor dining.
And so how do they make this arbitrary distinction between outdoor dining and
going to Walmart or what they're calling essential?
They don't.
They don't.
It doesn't make any sense.
There isn't.
There isn't.
So the county health officials shut us down, right, for three weeks, right
around, what was it, Thanksgiving?
Yes.
And some friends of ours took them to court and said, how can you just shut
down an industry with no evidence?
And they said, oh, we have plenty of evidence.
We have six studies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then they actually got to court and they had nothing.
Nothing.
All the evidence was from indoor dining.
Not one piece of paper.
And they had to admit it.
So when they admit it, then what happens?
No, but now they're appealing it.
Why?
Now they're appealing it.
By the way, they've hired an outside counsel.
And you think these people have our best intentions?
Come on.
These guys are being too nice.
This guy, Newsom wants a name for himself and no one's calling him out.
And it's absolutely insane to me.
Okay.
Here's the number one thing that boggles my mind.
You have a problem.
We all agree there's an illness.
Okay.
The rates of hospitalizations are going up.
Infections are going up.
But the rates of death are going down.
Okay.
So we have an issue.
Why not get together as a community and say, you know what?
We're going to grab a couple of restaurant people.
We're going to grab some doctors in the field.
Have a committee.
And have people that have real world experience.
Not PhDs, not theoretical people.
People that have real experience in the industry.
Grab them, grab a round table and say, okay,
we have this problem.
How do we mitigate it?
And how do we move forward smartly?
I've never been asked.
John's never been asked.
No doctor that I know in the wide variety of people that I take care of has
ever been asked
their opinion by the county, state, on any level.
He's right.
He's right.
That's the problem.
And I reached out directly.
I have Garcetti's email.
I email this mayor.
Puts me on with some random person from the office.
Then puts me on with the county.
And I say, hey, get us together.
Why don't you actually talk to real restaurant owners?
This is when they were thinking about, this is when they were going to do the
curfew, right?
There was a 10 p.m. curfew.
And I said, where's the 10 p.m. curfew come from?
Oh, well, when people get inebriated, they get looser and then they're super
spreaders
at restaurants.
And I'm like, okay, why 10 p.m.?
It's like, that's the time when people really start getting inebriated.
And I was like, but you realize you could at least say, hey, close up, let
people make
sure they get out an