Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Midlife Happiness project. And my guest today aims to be to cooking what Roger Federer is to tennis what Taylor Swift is to singing. That's right. Very soon, when you think online superstar chef, you're going to be thinking about my next guest. So stick around. You're going to like this episode.
Hi there. I'm Sarah, and we have an amazing guest today. Super psyched to introduce you all to him. He is my new friend, Mark. Hi, Mark.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Hey, how's everyone doing?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Well, Mark has a really interesting story. He actually is a retired police sergeant. I have to say. I think you're the only police officer I know, certainly the only one we've ever had on the show. A retired police sergeant who, after retirement, decided to do something really different. And I can't wait to discuss that. So, Mark, what is this thing, this thing that you're doing with your time, with your life, that is really energizing your life and making you happy?
[00:01:27] Speaker B: I have decided, and I've been doing it for a little while now. I started being a content creator and created a cooking show for YouTube.
So I bring people into my home via the Internet and I show them my ability or my inability, which it goes both ways.
I show them the successes, I show them the failures. But the. The point of it, in the end, what is, I want to show that somebody with zero culinary experience, who I can make ice and I can boil water and I might fry an egg, can actually make complex dishes that you would see on tv, that you would see in a restaurant and that you would pay money for and sit down. And instead of having to tip a waiter, I get to sit down on my couch or in my dining room table and eat it and not have to worry about it, except I have to do the dishes.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: So you have no formal culinary experience and you just jumped into this. So I've got to ask then, is this. This new thing with this cooking? And then by extension of that, this cooking channel, is this something that sort of found you, or did you go looking for it? How did this land in your lap.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: So well, I kind of looked at it like, well, everybody does. Everybody needs to eat. Everybody needs food. But I. It started when I started dating my wife when we were dating and we met online, and she was a super huge foodie. And I was like, foodie? What's a foodie? I didn't understand it. I'm from Santa Barbara, but I lived on the east coast for a number of years where everything is fried, everything has vinegar, everything is pork, you know, it's cornbread and pork and biscuits and really good food, but not necessarily gourmet. And my girlfriend at the time, now wife, we went out to dinner, and she took me to this place, and we had this amazing french dinner, and she's eating her salad. She goes, you should try this. I said, I don't eat beets. As an example, she goes, try this. And I took a bite of this beet salad and went, that's what beets are supposed to taste like.
Yeah, they're supposed to taste good. They're not supposed to taste like dirt. No, they're not supposed to taste like dirt. You've been eating canned beets your whole life. Okay, so. And it was, she introduced me to things, and then she would cook dinner while I was at work, and I'd come home like, is that smell? And she goes, well, I spent a couple hours making you bouffe bourguignon. I was like, wow, okay, what's that all about? And she shows me the recipe, and she's got this recipe box that I'm not allowed to share and I'm not allowed to show because her mom and dad wrote all of the recipes and then gifted it to her. And it's all family recipes that have been passed down. And we've got the box, and we make stuff out of it all the time. There's certain recipes that aren't for sale. They're never being given away. They're never being shared. And there's others like her pie recipe. For her pie crust recipe, she makes an awesome pie crust, awesome apple pie, and her pie crust recipe. Every year during the holidays, family goes, we're going to have some of this pie. So nobody else makes pies. My wife has to make all the pies. And then she tells everybody what the secret is, and everybody's like, oh, well, it's part butter and part lard and blah, blah. No, no. It's on the back of every crisco can.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Okay, so I totally love this story. You've always liked food. Clearly there was a curiosity. You were interested, inspired by your wife, and sort of experiencing these elevated, let's say, restaurants.
But what made you take the leap from, okay, so now I'm cooking. I'm pretty good at this, to, yeah, I'm gonna have a YouTube channel.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: I would watch YouTube. YouTube videos of. And oftentimes I'll still refer to them to. To make a certain dish or for a certain technique. Like, I forgot what that was. Okay. That's what that is.
[00:06:26] Speaker A: All right?
[00:06:26] Speaker B: And then. And I can get inspiration from YouTube, but I'm watching some of these youtubers that are putting out great content. It's arthem. It looks amazing. And I'm like, I can do that. Why can't I do that? I mean, I have cameras, I have lights, I have a phone, I have the Internet, I have a Google account. It's not hard. And then started making videos. And if anybody ever goes to our YouTube channel and they scroll to, like, the bottom, if they sort it by age, the old videos, I watch them now, and I cringe.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: I relate to that.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: And I'm sure, like, if the one of the latest videos that I put out, I was super proud of. I started making YouTube shorts, which I'm seeing a lot of.
A lot of really good, actually better results than I am our long form content. But I was like, well, if that guy can do it, why can't I do it? I mean, I've got, you know, the job I had at the time, because when I moved back here, I still worked a little bit. It. The job I had, it afforded me the opportunity. I was off three days a week during the week, every other week. And then I was off for a weekend. Every other weekend. It's like everybody else is gone. They're at work or at school. I got plenty of time. Let's cook. Let's cook. Let's. Let's figure out if we can do this. And then how it morphed was, we go out. We go out to dinner, my wife and I. Now we go out to dinner, and we generally won't go to, like, a steakhouse or something like that, because my wife goes, I'm just gonna eat it, and I'm gonna go, yours is better. Why are we here spending money when we could do it at home for less money? And it's better? So that's what we started doing. We would go to a restaurant. Like, we go to Locita as an example. Locita is a great restaurant. And I was like, I can learn how to make paella. Watched a couple of YouTube videos, bought a paella pan, failed epically at paella. It tasted like paella. It did not look like paella.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Well, I like everybody. I like to hear this.
I like to hear this, Mark, because I was just about to say, what we like to do with this show is it's all fine and well to present these people who are living their best life and really enjoying some successes with whatever it is they're doing. But we also like to present the reality that anything new, anything that's foreign that you start, you really have to expect some hiccups. So let's hear it. You got any of those stories the other day?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: In fact, it's on our YouTube channel. I started on, like, a baking crusade. I was like, well, I've got, you know, I can make a stew. I can config garlic and whatnot. Bread. How hard is bread? So I started with sourdough starter, you know, and most people get sourdough starter from a friend, a family member, whatever. They're like, here, here's a couple of grams. And then they nurture it and make it their own. I wanted to know how to make sourdough starter. Like, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Where did sourdough starter come from? Well, it comes from two ingredients, water and flour. That's it.
It's a fermentation of water and flour. So I made my own sourdough starter. Started making sourdough bread, and it was going good. I'm like, okay, sourdough is cool because everybody made sourdough during the pandemic. I've still got, like, quart sized containers of yeast and sourdough starter and all the stuff to do it. I still have it. So, and every now and then, I'll bust it out and I'll make sourdough. But then that progressed from sourdough, which is just time consuming, not hard to. I'm gonna make, like, a loaf of sandwich bread. Let me find a really good sandwich bread recipe. I find that I make that. That was successful. Let's make a baguette. Made a baguette. Okay, let's go to bagels. Now. That becomes a little bit of a challenge because now you're boiling your dough and then you're cooking it. And the bagels were okay. They tasted like bagels. They didn't have the chew of a bagel. And I had just recently come back from visiting my daughter in New York and had New York bagels. And I was like, I'm calling this video making New York bagels while you're not in New York. And I did, and I didn't. Did not make New York bagels. I made bagel adjacent something.
But then I was like, I'm not going to deal with bagels anymore. Let's. Let's really challenge ourselves, because that's what I. I'm a high growth needs kind of person, so I, like, put more on my plate. Put more on my plate. And I was like, let's do croissants. Croissants can't be that hard. I mean, it's just a rolled pastry that's baked in buttery. Oh, no, no, no, no. That's three days. That's a three day process. I didn't realize that at first, but then I committed. I'm like, three days. I buy the expensive butter, I get the right flour.
I do everything. And when I pulled them out of the oven, they looked like they were croissant shaped, but they looked like buttermilk biscuits.
And if you bit them, they tasted. They tasted. Okay. You're like, okay, I could. If I close my eyes at a magic croissant. Okay. But you had to close your eyes and imagine croissant. I didn't want that. I wanted you to look at it and go, that's a croissant. Put it in your mouth and go, yep, that's a really good croissant.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: But here's the thing with you. Do you know how many people, we've talked about this on this podcast so many times? It's that often. So often, people are so focused on the end game in that I have to have this result. And if it doesn't render these results and it wasn't successful, I will walk away frustrated and not interested in giving it another try. And the thing that we like to put out there is often it's just the process. It's the trying and the challenge of it all. If it was easy and you just did it once and then it worked out great every time, chances are you'd probably lose interest, because what's the point of all this? I liked what you said about you're a high growth needs kind of guy, and I like that because it's this need to keep learning. And again, if everything came easy, then I think it's just. If there's not a bit of a challenge, then it's just. Just not exciting.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Right, right. And, like, especially today with what I'm actually making for dinner tonight, that. And that was the thing. You watch other youtubers that are making a specific component of a dish. Like, you can watch Andrew Ray babish make a specific item for a meal. He doesn't necessarily make a whole meal. He makes that specific.
And he's in a studio, and he's got 18 of them on standby, and his family's not relying on it for sustenance. They're not eating that for dinner because dinner's upstairs in his apartment, not downstairs in his studio. I'm literally making dinner. So there's added pressure that I kind of have to get it right. And if I don't get it right, my family eats it and they kind of go, yeah, that was maybe don't shoot video of it, just make it for dinner.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Well, you are such an inspiring guy, without a doubt, love that. You just sort of delved right into this. And not for 1 second did you think, can or can't I do this. You just simply said, I'm doing it. And that's, that's what we're doing, right?
[00:14:40] Speaker B: The Internet can't take away my birthday, no matter how hard they try.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Love it. So, okay, so you being an inspiring guy, the kind of guy that people are going to listen to this and say, maybe I want to take up cooking, but our experience has been that every inspiring person was inspired themselves. It might have been a person, might have been a situation.
You've alluded to, obviously, YouTube being an inspiration to you, but is there a person, a specific chef, a person, anything that you can think of, point to that? It's like, yeah, that's, that's one of, if not the thing that inspired me to do this.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: I would have to say part of it comes from my mom and her background. So, I mean, obviously when I was a kid, she was, you know, making meals or whatnot, but being of palestinian descent, I learned how different arabic dishes were cooked, so. And I've actually got a whole recipe book that she's given to me that is very middle eastern and very mediterranean as far as a lot of the recipes, and I haven't dove into it too much yet. And my other inspiration's gotta be my wife, because in the end, if she would just participate with the youtubing and being on camera, we'd rock it, because she can cook. And I'm always just trying to catch up with her. So there's some, there are certain things that she has said I do better than her. And of course, you know, it's like your mom's cooking. I can try to duplicate it. And mom's was always better. My wife's is always better than mine, so it's my wife.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Well, that's lovely. I hope she's hearing this.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: I think she will. She's not yet. She's still at work.
So that's the other thing. She's working full time and I'm a house husband, so I have time.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Well, this is, I mean, it's one of these things that you say you are a retired law enforcement, you know, sergeant, but at the end of the day, it's. This is a commitment. I mean, I can speak to this because anytime you start a podcast or a YouTube channel, it's not something that you do kind of when you feel like it. Once the wheels are in motion, you know, you've committed to it and you need to get out episodes. And there is. There is pressure there, without a doubt.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Yep. And very specifically. And I. I feel that all the time, you know, in producing different videos and doing the editing, the post production and all of that, and I look at YouTube studio and go, okay, I can see that interest is dropping off. I need to get something out. So I started doing it on a fairly regular basis.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: And apparently it's not enough. So I'm finding, like I said, with YouTube shorts, I'm finding a lot of really quick growth and a lot of view time, but then it drops right off.
And I was like, okay, you know, I'm getting, you know, a thousand views on this and it's a 62nd video or a 15 2nd video as you're familiar with shorts. I was like, well, you know, I'll just keep doing it. The last one I did, which was I literally held my phone and shot video of it. I didn't use a DSLR, didn't do anything with lighting, and it was a fairly simple recipe. It was amish beef and noodles. It's a 48 2nd video.
And in 24 hours it was viewed almost 7000 times, my average being 200.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Was like, my son calls me from work, he goes, what did you do to the YouTube channel?
[00:18:58] Speaker A: I don't gone viral.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: I did something. I'm not really sure what, but now I'm watching interest wane from that. I'm like, okay, I got to do another video and I got to do another short and it's got to be as good. And I don't even know what it was. It didn't feel good to me.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: The way it was done. But apparently the algorithm liked it, so people are watching it. I was like, okay, we're gonna keep going with that.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: And my wife is calling me, right? My wife is calling me right now. She must have heard me.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: So obviously you are super jazzed and into this. You love the whole process. You love the challenge, you love learning it. And above all else, you love food, which is awesome.
But here's the question of the day. How, how, or specifically, I guess, how has this really made you happy?
[00:20:04] Speaker B: I think where the happiness comes from is I've learned a couple of new skills. I've learned how to edit video and shoot video and deal with lighting and all that. But where the happiness really comes into play is when set that plate of food down in front of my family and they're like, this rocks. This is amazing. And bringing that happiness and joy to others through food is something I didn't think I'd like, but it's. It's massive. I did it the other day for. There was an event that they asked me to help cater, and I did it. And everyone was like, this was amazing. And I'm like, okay. I thought it was a mediocre cook on my part, but all right, cool. Everybody loves it.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: And food. Food does have a way of bringing people together, and I'm certainly not much of a cook, but when I do try my hand at it, certainly over major holidays with the family, I can relate to that. It does sort of have a. A power of bringing people and getting people to connect.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, no, it's. Yeah, connecting through food.
It's great seeing people do that, and I love to be a part of that.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: So, of course, you have to let everybody listening and watching hear. What is this channel?
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Go to YouTube and search for little kitchen. Big food.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Little kitchen.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Look for this mug and go from there.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: This is. This is fantastic. I don't know whether I'm going to be cooking more, having listened to you, but I certainly have appreciation for people who do this. And as we've said millions of times before, you know, the hope with this program is just inspiring people to find their thing. And whether it's cooking or otherwise, we can definitely hear and feel that you're super excited about what you're doing. And I love that. I love it. Thank you so much, Mark, for being a guest on our show today.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Well, thanks for having me. I look forward to talking to you again really soon.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I encourage everybody out there, you gotta go check out his YouTube channel. And again, he's. He's bringing it. He's. You've heard what he's had to say. This is a guy who, you know, like, maybe a lot of people out there really curious about food. No formal training. It can be done. There may be some screw ups along the way, but such is life. Anyway, on that note, thank you again for joining us on the Midlife Happiness project. Please, please, please subscribe to our channel. We want to keep bringing these wonderful, really interesting guests your way.
And on that note, we will see you next time.
