The Lone Star Plate

Today, we are joined by Kevin Newsum, CEO of the bottled espresso company Steamm. Steamm is a revolutionary coffee company, being the first organisation to ever provide real, quality espresso that’s bottled up and ready to drink. Kevin explains to us how the coffee is made and the different procedures they have to go through in order to maintain quality and safety.  With the pandemic causing problems for almost everyone, nothing’s different for Kevin.  He lets us in on how he’s pivoted Steamm’s business model and how he’s coping, being stuck at home with his young children.  ”We want to honour your coffee ritual, we want to bring you something that’s authentic.” – Kevin Newsum   

Today, I’m joined by David Goin, a local server in Texas. 

Just like many of us, he’s now effectively unemployed and has a lot of extra time on his hands. 

So what should he do with that time?

David’s decided to take action, and has been creating and distributing care packages to the homeless during the quarantine. 

The homeless have very limited resources available to them at this time, so they need the extra help, and David’s stepped up to the challenge. 

It’s truly inspiring to hear what he’s done and he makes me excited to be more proactive myself. 

We talk about how he got into helping in this way, and discuss our experiences travelling around the world. 

A fascinating, down to earth man, he leaves me feeling inspired and excited for the future. 

Today, on April 24, Governor Abbott’s executive order GA-16 goes into effect.

It allows for reopening of non-essential retail services, which can be provided through pickup, delivery by mail, and delivery to customers’ doorstep, if all safety measures are respected.

Why is that a reason to celebrate?

Kareem Hajjar, a restaurant lawyer from Austin who initiated Margs For Life TX campaign, explains Governor Abbott’s order in details, and how it puts thousands of restaurants, bars, distilleries, wineries, breweries, and other businesses back in action.

That means that bars and restaurants are finally allowed to sell cocktails “to-go,” which was the goal of the Margs For Life TX campaign.

Andrew O’Brien, a representative of Ruckify, joins me to discuss how his company has handled the current epidemic.

Have you ever wished you could rent out some exercise equipment? How about a turntable? Or a giant inflatable pub?

Ruckify is a platform that lets you rent out almost anything in a peer to peer fashion.

This means that not only can you rent almost anything on their website, you can make money renting your own stuff on there too.

The virus has caused problems for all businesses, and for Ruckify, it means that they’re no longer making any profit at all.

This isn’t easy for any company but in Andrew’s words ‘In times like these, the community is what’s most important.’

”Eighty percent of the things we own we only use twenty percent of the time. The average household has over 200,000 items in it.” – Andrew O’Brien

In this episode I’m checking in again with Silent Trevor, our guy behind the scenes.

We are recapping the events from the past couple of weeks,, the different guests we had, and commenting on how we are doing in the quarantine.