
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


If you have ever tried to make sense of wine by memorizing soil types, reciting limestone and Kimmeridgian and volcanic rock, or nodding along when someone says a wine has "minerality," you probably need this episode. Most people, including a surprising number of professionals, start with the dirt and try to reason their way forward to the glass. Pedro Parra, terroir consultant, winemaker, PhD, and author of Terroir Footprints, has spent twenty-plus years proving that the only honest place to start is the wine itself. In this conversation he dismantles the "terroir doesn't exist" crowd, explains why he traded the word minerality for something far more useful, and reveals how jazz, imperfection, and a $100,000 machine most estates use completely wrong all point to the same hidden idea: great wine has a sound, and once you can hear it, you can't unhear it.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
If you think you're managing your anxiety, your anger, or that low hum of dread that follows you into work, you're probably doing the one thing guaranteed to keep it alive. Most of us were trained from childhood to control emotions…and every coping mechanism quietly tells your brain the threat is real. Cedric Bertelli, former Ritz-Carlton restaurant director turned founder of the Emotional Health Institute, spent years studying the neuroscience of emotion and somatic resolution to prove the harder truth: an emotional difficulty is just an outdated prediction your brain is replaying on loop.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Most bartenders dreaming of ownership get the equation backwards. They obsess over the menu, the concept, the aesthetic…and treat money and timelines as details to sort out later. That instinct is exactly what kills bars. Dave Kwiatkowski, founder of Detroit's Sugar House and the Detroit Optimist Society restaurant group, has opened around ten properties in fifteen years, everything from classic cocktail bars, a tiki bar, a molecular mixology spot in an alley, a '70s dive, to even a brand-new gay bar called Trombone. His hardest-won lesson has nothing to do with technique. It's that the corner you cut to "just get open" becomes the floor caving in two years later. In this conversation we dig into building a bar empire in Detroit (not New York, not Chicago, and that's the entire point), the home-grown pipeline that turns basement bar backs into the best bartenders in the city, surviving a pandemic with 250 people on payroll, and why passion is the only honest reason to do this work.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Danil Nevsky entered 23 competitions before he placed in a single one. He dropped shakers. Broke glass. Forgot his lines on stage. Then his appendix burst on a plane and nearly killed him after eleven countries on a solo trip around the world. None of it was the cool, detached version of bartending the industry sells you. Instead, it was caring out loud, in public, where everyone could watch him fail.
The thing quietly capping your career is an attitude you probably picked up as armor: the studied indifference, the "I don't give a shit" that reads as cool and costs you every opportunity that actually compounds. Danil Nevsky, World's 50 Best opening teams, eighteen months and eleven countries on the road, founder of a free global training platform, makes the case that earnestness, not talent, is the real unfair advantage, and that the people who give opportunities away are the only ones who last a whole career. This episode is the reframe your detachment has been hiding from you: how to taste like a pro, why your Instagram is the resume you're not editing, and where the real leverage lives inside a tipping system most bartenders never think to question.
Expect to Learn:
LINKS
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
You can study for years. Spend a fortune. Fly across the world to taste, interview, and prepare. And still fail.
If you think passing wine's elite certifications comes down to how much you know, you're basically only half right. The Master Sommelier path, the WSET diploma, the Master of Wine: none of them reliably reward the person with the biggest mental database. They do by necessity reward the person who can communicate under pressure, recover from failure, and hold two contradictory truths in their mind at once. In this episode, Latvian sommelier Agnese, championship winner, WSET diploma holder, and Master of Wine candidate behind the No Sediment series, joins me to break down the real difference between the CMS and WSET routes. We set out to illuminate why blind tasting and timed essays sort the field harder than raw knowledge ever could, to share a counterintuitive truth about oak that most drinkers get backwards, and to point out the failure-and-recovery mindset that separates the people who eventually pass from the people who quietly quit. If your entire approach to learning wine is just "memorize more," this is your missing piece.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Most people in hospitality are working harder than anyone they know and still not building wealth. Not because they lack discipline and not because they don't make enough money. Because nobody ever taught them that making money and building wealth are two completely different skills, and if they are investing, the system they're trusting to close that gap is the exact system quietly taking half of what they earn. This episode exists to fix that. David Nassief got fired at 63 with two years before his projected bankruptcy, and went on a personal mission to distill everything one needed for success onto one piece of paper. He built his wealth on straight commission with variable income while launching a company. His system is designed for people who do not have the time, the luxury, or the margin to get it wrong.
Important note: this is NOT investment advice. Every investment has the potential to go to zero. Every investment can lose money, and we discuss exactly that. I am a random person on the internet. Do not follow my advice: make up your mind, do research, and do what is right for you.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Most people who start a podcast quit before episode 10.
I didn't. I hit 100 because I am a stubborn MOFO. And the version of me who pressed record on episode one has almost nothing in common with the the me that is filming this.
Before I ever launched the show, I spent six months thinking about it. Months before I even mentioned it to my wife. The story running in my head is the same one most people are running about their own thing right now: Who am I to do this? Will I stick with it? What will people think? Then one day I stopped planning, bought a mic, and shut those questions up by answering them with action.
In this episode I open up the 21 lessons I wish that someone had handed me on day one… including the night I sat across from a brilliant guest and realized 40 minutes in that I had never hit record. I also give away the single boring habit that lets me tell, week by week, exactly which content is actually working and which is vanity noise.
If you've been "planning" something for the last six months, skip this episode and you'll be planning the same thing six months from now.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Most whiskey drinkers, aspiring distillery owners, and career-stuck professionals never take the plunge and go out on their own. They don’t trust themselves to figure it out. They think their palate is either "good" or "bad." They think starting a distillery requires too many permits and too much (unrewarded) patience. They think the title, the corner office, the equipment, the build-out is the finish line. Brandon McCraney almost lost everything chasing the version of success most people chase: corporate ladder. Then he tried out all the craziest of paths: equipment-heavy distillation and then high-volume distribution. The real craft and the real career were in the opposite direction. This episode dismantles the myth that consistency equals quality, that owning equipment equals mastery, and that grinding harder at the wrong thing eventually pays off. Brandon's story is the missing playbook for anyone in spirits, hospitality, or career limbo who already suspects their current path isn't going to deliver what they actually want.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
Most bartenders treat social media like a hobby and their bar shifts like a career. Some people embrace the other path. The bartenders building real leverage: books, products, brands, audiences that follow them across jobs, are treating the bar as the launchpad, not the destination. Elissa Dunn of @hellqueencockails built that exact playbook in five years, starting from a cubicle and a wine-spill firing. In this episode she breaks down why her social is run like a portfolio not a personality, what she had to rebuild from scratch when a trademark blew up her original brand, and the moment she walked away from a bartending job she loved because the brand needed the time more than the bar did. If you've been behind the stick for years and can't point to anything you actually own then this is the missing playbook.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
He opened a bar with no sign on the door for six months. No artwork on the walls. His architect quit in the middle of the build and nobody told him for three months.
Then he won Best US Hotel Bar in America.
Most bartenders think opening their own bar is about creativity, cocktails, and a good corner location. That's why most of them never open one, and why of those who do, most who do go broke inside two years. The bartenders who actually build great bars understand something almost nobody talks about on stage: the whole game is leverage, opportunity, and surviving the build long enough to open the doors. Aaron DeFeo turned a strange, unused space in a downtown Phoenix hotel into Little Rituals, the Best US Hotel Bar in America. He did it after getting fired from a bartending job at 25, working five years at Hotel Congress for $12 an hour, running cocktail programs inside a tribal casino, and surviving a build that took years instead of simply months. This is the field manual for everything that happens between "I want my own bar" and "we just won best bar in the country." If you're a bartender, manager, brand rep, consultant, or anyone who's ever quietly pitched themselves an opening, this is the conversation you didn't know you were missing.
Expect to Learn:
Links:
Service starts now.
Follow the show: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube
I talk to people in and around the service industry space. I'm looking to hear from the people I wish I could have talked to when I was coming up in bars. Said another way: I am trying to make sense of this wild, beautiful mess that can be a life working in bars, and help others that are feeling similarly confused and/or lost. Check out the Podcast Website Here and get in touch with me!
Classic Episodes You May Like:
As always, I’m just here taking notes, trying to figure out what it all means.
Cheers
From the publisher's feed