Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire [00:00:04]:
Welcome to another edition of the Career Education Report podcast. I'm Jason Altmire and this is a special episode of the podcast because this episode was recorded live at the North American Career Education Convention. And I had the opportunity to sit down with Robert Irvine, who many people know as a world class chef. He's an entrepreneur, he's a philanthropist. He has done 300 episodes of the hit show Restaurant Impossible on the Food Network. He has started many businesses. He has a restaurant at the Pentagon and a long standing relationship with veterans, which we talk about. He has a new business leadership book called Overcoming Impossible.
Jason Altmire [00:00:53]:
And he has a foundation and he gives back to servicemen and women and first responders. So it's a really interesting conversation about his career, his interest in business, his suggestions on leadership. So I think you'll enjoy this episode and I would encourage you to take a listen again. This was recorded in May in Las Vegas. Chef Robert Irvine, thank you for being with us.
Robert Irvine [00:01:19]:
Pleasure. It's exciting.
Jason Altmire [00:01:21]:
You have had a long and distinguished career in culinary arts.
Robert Irvine [00:01:25]:
Long.
Jason Altmire [00:01:26]:
I think it's interesting to think about how that profession has changed and what you learned when you were just starting both your education and your early career. And what would you suggest now would be different if you could do it all over again?
Robert Irvine [00:01:43]:
Well, number one, when I started in the culinary career, the world was a different place. You know, I'm talking, I'm almost 60 years old. So I was 15 when I joined the Royal Navy. Yes. My mother found me drinking beer at home, not a good move. And she took me to the recruitment office. I hated school. That was true.
Robert Irvine [00:02:07]:
I loved woodwork, home economics and sports. There were three things that I loved to do. The rest of the time, I never went to school. My mother would clean my soccer boots. My mother would do my homework. Great mom. Until she caught me drinking beer. And then it was off to the Navy.
Robert Irvine [00:02:25]:
So for me, school was good for sports, it was good for the things I just told you. It didn't help me get into the military because when I took the entrance exam of English and maths, five being the lowest, one being the highest, I got five, five. So I'm not going to be a pilot, I'm not going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a cook. And it was good for me because home economics was one of my favorite things at school. Why not? Because of food. There was 30 girls and me, by the way, I made my first quiche Lorraine. And the fact that cheese, eggs, bacon, onions and pastry, maybe a little cream, could make A meal was fascinating to me and it still is to this day, fascinating to me.
Robert Irvine [00:03:12]:
And that's what got me into the world of culinary. When the guy said to me, you're going to congratulations, Sonny, you're in the Majesty's Royal Navy and you're going to be a cook, I went nuts because there's something I enjoyed. But my father was very upset with that because he was a career soldier and he felt it was subservient being a cook for somebody. Because in England it's very different than here, upstairs, downstairs, you know, you serve them people. Well, I've been doing it for many years, so that's how it's saying. And, and today's culinary world is very much different. I think technology has changed the food systems that we cook with, the food that we, we now don't even grow the food, it comes from foreign countries. And if you look at tomato, anybody seen a tomato lately? They're all the same, they're all the same size, the same shape, the same color, the nutritional values are different.
Robert Irvine [00:04:10]:
So, so when I started to cook, it was very different to today's cooks.
Jason Altmire [00:04:17]:
Thinking about that, what advice would you give to yourself looking back everything that you've learned over time? Just starting in that position, what would be a valuable lesson?
Robert Irvine [00:04:28]:
Listen, you know, for me as a young kid, I was a rambunctious kid. And yes, we used to peel potatoes. We don't peel potatoes in the military anymore. Sorry, we're not in the 1940s. We buy them already done. Right. For obvious reasons, I would say I grew up in an era of a military that was very old. I was a young 15 and a half year old kid going into the Navy, Royal Navy with 30, 40 year old, 50 year old sailors taking me under their wing.
Robert Irvine [00:05:05]:
My pay was about £500amonth, which was about $800 at that time. And that went on beer in the first week. I wouldn't advise that anymore. But what it did for me was having older generational people guide me. So my training may have been eight to 12 weeks, but my continued education was six months on a warship going to the Falklands. Yeah, so I grew up really fast. Number one, because the Falklands War, number two, because I had 240 men and there was no women in, in the British military at that point, on ships anyway. So I grew up really fast steaming, you know, eight weeks to the Falkland Isles.
Robert Irvine [00:05:53]:
And by the way, we might be shot at. And when I was there, we were shot at. So you go from this 15 year old kid and you grow up really fast and you miss the years of playing with bikes and going to university and all those things that normal people do. I skipped that by five years. So for me it was a great learning period. But I was a young kid taking over older people's positions and jobs and becoming a leader at a very young age. Yeah, you know, it wasn't just chopping food. I mean, we went to Action Station and some missiles coming in.
Robert Irvine [00:06:32]:
I threw a bunch of stuff in a steam table, cracked the steam and went up to put missiles on a missile holder. That was my job. So yeah, it was a completely different era.
Jason Altmire [00:06:44]:
You talked about your upbringing and I think it's relevant to this audience. This is an audience across North America. Career schools of all types, programs across the career sector.
Robert Irvine [00:06:54]:
Yay for career schools. Yes. And I'm so happy you laugh because I was, you'll laugh. I was just at Harvard, lecturing at Harvard. I'm the only, the only protein bar company that started by me that had no institutional money, that became billion dollars of company and we didn't use any institutional money. So I went into a school that has 54 billion in savings, yet we have no trade schools. Doesn't make sense to me. But anyway, anybody know what I do with the military? No.
Robert Irvine [00:07:35]:
That's really exciting. Thank you. I'm modernizing the military feeding platform across the joint force. 2.7 million people a day, five meals a day, no matter where they are around the world. And it's interesting because we were talking about skill sets and education and a cook in the military gets four weeks of cook training and then four weeks of specialized jungle feeding kind of thing. Right. I've said that's not enough. Why? It's just not enough to train people.
Robert Irvine [00:08:10]:
But we don't have the schools except these schools that take exorbitant amount of money and give you names after your initials, after your name. That really doesn't mean anything to me. Because if you can't feed a thousand people an aircraft carrier or 6000 people on aircraft carrier, then you're no good to me. You haven't been trained the way I need you. And I feel that the military needs more training in certain branches. If you fly a drone, you're 19 years old, you fly $180 million drone. If it crashes. Why? You fell asleep, you didn't have a breakfast.
Robert Irvine [00:08:45]:
That was $5. But you cost me 180 million. So for me, the training that we give and the feeding that we give these young men and women and it doesn't matter what mos, what specialty it is, they have to go to a school. We have them in the military for rigging parachutes, right? We have a school for that. We have a school for teaching how to cook, but we just don't give enough time. And if I give you a statistic, you'll laugh. In 1.4 million active duty men and women, we spend 10.2 billion a year in obesity driven disease pills. That's a true number as of today.
Robert Irvine [00:09:27]:
So if we could educate the cooks, educate the purchasers into, you know, a standard milligrams of sodium for a soldier, sailor, airman, Marine corps, coast guard or Guardian is 600 milligrams of sodium per day. But if you buy me 1,000 milligrams of sodium chicken and I like the cook that I do this, then we wonder why we have those problems and we can't find cooks. That's why you have a problem with. There are 10 million jobs unmanned in this country right now as I'm sitting on this stage. And by the way, even if I pay you 50 or $100, you're not going to fill them an hour, by the way, you're not going to fill them. We need training, we need trade schools, we need smaller schools that focus. I'm a dummy. I'm a dummy.
Robert Irvine [00:10:24]:
I have 18 companies, 8,250 employees. We do a lot of money in sales. But I didn't get the training. I had to train things after the fact because technology is changing in the food space. Specifically, because that's what you're hitting with me right now. Sous vide is in there. We don't cook anymore, we don't peel potatoes. We don't have to think because it's all done for us.
Robert Irvine [00:10:51]:
And I think that's the difference between when I started at 15 years old as the food I'm producing today. Because you go to any three star Michelin, they're not making peeling potatoes. Sorry, dude, they're not. You think they are, but they're not. They're doing the same thing as a cruise ship is doing in Miami, you know. So has it changed much? Yes, it's become more convenient. And I don't think we've trained to the, to the length that I trained 40, 50 years ago.
Jason Altmire [00:11:23]:
Have you found that there's been a greater acceptance of the need for career programs in doing this work?
Robert Irvine [00:11:29]:
Definitely. If I look at England as a prime example, and maybe you're not as old as me, some of you, maybe, but When Margaret Thatcher was a prime minister of England, she was all about trade schools really. She fought with the unions, lost by the way. But if you look in England today, there's very few trade schools. And that's what England was built on, that's what America was built on. And yet we've got away from elitist. Can go to a school if you have the money to go to that school. I could never get that school.
Robert Irvine [00:12:02]:
Anybody from Puerto Rico. Hey, now we're talking. So I just. As in Puerto Rico, the United States of America has a National Guard. In Puerto Rico, the National Guard has a program where it takes 16 to 18 year old kids, does two things that no other National Guard does by the way. I'm trying to change it. It takes you off the street or from your home and it gets you a GED. So I just had 250 kids from Puerto Rico from broken homes, from drug families, from normal families, from all walks of life.
Robert Irvine [00:12:43]:
22 weeks, $7 million program graduating them after 22 weeks of a military academy from zero. And their GP, their GPA, what was there, 4.0. Right. And these are kids that have been written off, right? So I'm a big, I'm a big believer and we can take anybody and train them to do anything as long as they have the attitude to be able to want to do it right.
Jason Altmire [00:13:18]:
And on that note, many students are non traditional. They come from underserved backgrounds similar to what you described for yourself. What advice would you give to those students in seeking the career, the profession of their choice, working hard and then building a success?
Robert Irvine [00:13:35]:
I would say number one, pick something that you really want to do. If I didn't want to cook, I would hate being an aircraft carrier. Cooking for 6,000 people, five meals a day. Go and test something out. Go work somewhere for free, right. If you can. But really focus on honing what is it that you want to do based on the traversing world that we live in it cyber, all these, these AI things that are coming out now that are helping and could be bad on the other side also. But, but what is it you want to do? Work hard to get there.
Robert Irvine [00:14:12]:
And when you get there, the biggest thing is to learn, continually learn, right? Me, I run 18 companies and I am not this. I make eggs for a living. We have TV shows, we make clothes to the military, we make uniforms, we make, we make food, we make nutrition bars, we make self ordering platforms for food product. I've had to learn those. That's not my core competency. I had to learn how to make tea for four years. And I'm not kidding the guy, I used to make it and he would throw it at me every day. That's how I learned how to do something correctly.
Robert Irvine [00:14:50]:
Once you really find the love or find the love of what you want to do. I have two daughters. One's a doctor, one's a lawyer. Where they got the smarts from, I have no idea. But it wasn't me. They wanted to be vets, they wanted to be orthopedic surgeons. And now one's a lawyer, one's a pediatric speech pathology doctor, criminal lawyer, by the way, at 24 years old, she fell in love with it, started working as a public defender and they went to school at night to, to become a criminal lawyer. She actually graduated on Thursday.
Robert Irvine [00:15:26]:
That's what, no, thank you. That's great. But thank you. But she did the work, I didn't, I paid for it. She did the work. And I think anybody that's going to get into any business, no matter what it is, you've got to love the business and you've got to be able to take a mentor and have somebody take you under the wing and teach you. Not the things you can teach in a textbook, by the way. It's the things when you leave the schools that nobody tells you about.
Robert Irvine [00:15:55]:
And this is why I'm so into trade schools, because the people in trade schools are teaching you something because they're still in that trade. When you go to a Harvard, you've got a professor or a Columbia, and I've done both. You go to a professor that's been in that school for 15, 20, 30 years and has watched the industry change, but never been in that industry as it's changed. That's why I believe in schools that are hands on, that the professors and the teachers are still in this business. Because if you've been over there for 15 years, it's changed and you don't know it. I don't care how much you read, you're not in it and touching it.
Jason Altmire [00:16:37]:
You were just at Harvard. You mentioned President Trump recently proposed redirecting $3 billion away from Harvard.
Robert Irvine [00:16:45]:
Am I excited about that? Yes, very much, yes.
Jason Altmire [00:16:47]:
And you, you've been outspoken about that. What are your thoughts about that idea?
Robert Irvine [00:16:51]:
Look, I'm a big believer in and give small vocational schools the money. That's what America was built on. Small business was built in America. That's what made America so good. And if you don't believe me, go back to the 60s. So in the 60s. Anybody old enough to know the 60s? No. Okay, the 60s, when.
Robert Irvine [00:17:14]:
When World War II and all that had finished Vietnam, we'd finished that. Then we had something called the brain drain. So all the. The. The technical people were bought to the United States. They became citizens immediately because we wanted their brains. We need to get back to that, because there are no brain. There are still brains out there, don't get me wrong.
Robert Irvine [00:17:35]:
But we need homegrown brains. The next generation of. I'm not cooks, but cooks. The next generation. Because we won't be making things like this anymore. We do, but very rarely. Soldiers. Okay.
Robert Irvine [00:17:49]:
Where do you think our soldiers are coming from? What the future is going to be? How many people know what humanoids are? We don't want them. Not in our house. But that's what's going to be your future of the military. We've seen it with dogs. Dogs. Now in New York City, I had the first dog that was ever built in this country at our foundation event to show people what the future. And they said, no, it's not going to be that. Five years later, what are we doing? The head of Boston Dynamics has two humanoids and a dog, not a real dog, that patrol around his house a day.
Robert Irvine [00:18:28]:
That's the future of our world. But what humanoids can do is weld, is taste food and have a feeling. We're always going to need tradespeople, always. No matter what. Even though the footprint is getting smaller, we will look to produce more, just like the President's doing now. And I don't care. I work for Republicans, Democrats. I work for all of them.
Robert Irvine [00:18:57]:
And I've agreed with some of. Some of. Some of. Some not. Some not. But what I do believe in is the way we stay strong, the way we get better, is producing the product in the United States and not relying on somebody else. Because the minute we do that, look where we are now.
Jason Altmire [00:19:16]:
And those are our workers, the people represented in this room, our students become the pipeline for filling those gaps.
Robert Irvine [00:19:24]:
And if we don't do it now. And I laugh and look, I don't care what political party you're at. I really don't. I literally cook for both sides. And I'm apolitical. I'm like the military. Somebody says, do you like Trump? I'm like, no comment. Somebody like this one, no comment.
Robert Irvine [00:19:38]:
Because I serve the apex. This is seal of the United States of America, which I serve at the pleasure of the President, whoever's there at that time, making their decision. But what I will say is we Laughed in the first President Trump's years or his term because he made a Space Force live long and prosper. No, I can't do it right. And I was with the head of Space Force two days ago in Washington D.C. and what we're doing with the space domain is incredible. But if we hadn't have done this at that time, we would be 10, 15, 20 years behind of where we still are now. You know, you've heard Golden Dome.
Robert Irvine [00:20:22]:
I don't know if you know what that means, but it means protection, Right? I know what it means in a whole different light. But that has to come from this country. That has to be built in this country. It has to be engineered in this country, just like the F47 and all these other things that we have. And half of the stuff you will never know because you don't know it until we use it. Don't worry about war with China and Iran, don't worry about that stuff. Worry about the currency and worry about the trade and worry about the things that we do collectively. Because I train people, you know, that's what I believe in and that's what my companies are.
Robert Irvine [00:21:02]:
I want to train you to take over my job. That's what training is, not only to get a salary, but give, give a trade and make it worthy of a family that can feel strong about themselves making money and taking care of their families. And right now we talk about chips and we talk about AI and we talk about all this other thing that we mine from there and there in Iceland. And don't believe half of what you read, please, because it's all garbage. But we have to mine lithium here. We have to. By the way, it's one right outside Dallas. Big, big mine.
Robert Irvine [00:21:43]:
17 minerals. You'll hear about it in the next couple of weeks if you haven't already traded do. But yeah, I mean, hey, if we can't self sustain United States. And look, there's always going to be trade. Look, we've been doing trade with countries for billions of years, right? Right. Since caveman times. You know, here's this, here's this, here's this. We're always going to trade, but we should be self sufficient in case something happens.
Jason Altmire [00:22:11]:
You know, as someone who owns 18 companies, been an entrepreneur, you're a vocal advocate for career education. Both sides of that equation. What advice would you give to schools to appropriately form curriculums that, that train and educate students for the jobs of the future?
Robert Irvine [00:22:30]:
I think you just answered your own question, right? Schools have to create curriculums and I've just had this conversation about I can't train. I can't get cooks in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine. I can't because we don't pay them enough, we don't train them enough, we don't do all those things. So I just had a great conversation with Escoffier about, okay, how do we take what I do or what the military does and then give me a curriculum they can continue to learn while they're just like my daughter did when she was working. While these are airmen on aircraft carriers or soldiers or snipers or whatever, when do they get to continue their education? Because when you get out, who wants to be a sniper? Nobody. Unless you want to be in the police force. You want entrepreneurial skills, you need schools. And I say them to military folks.
Robert Irvine [00:23:26]:
Look, get as much schooling as you can while you're in on whatever you like to do. Even if you don't like to do it, do it. Because when you get out your leadership qualities from the military and then you can go to any, you know, school. And for the people that create in the curriculum, you have to look at the way in which the industry that you're trying to teach is changing. And that's why I love schools more than I do Harvard, because they're not in it anymore. They talk about it and they read about it, but they're not actually doing it. When I go to culinary schools and I see what the teachers, yes, knife cuts, great, okay, I get the basics. The basics are good.
Robert Irvine [00:24:11]:
But what about the advanced stuff? Why, why am I not teaching sous vide cooking? Right? That's the future of food. Put it in bags. Uncle Ben's did it 50 years ago, right? They was way. And if they'd have figured out how to do it, they would have been a much bigger company because sous vide is now mashed potatoes. It's chicken. All I'm doing is boiling a bag can open and serving it. Why? Because I know that every portion of that 50 portions is, is the same nutritionals that everybody's getting. We should be teaching that.
Robert Irvine [00:24:43]:
We should be teaching about robotics. All right, what, what's happening? And if you don't believe me, look at AI in, in BMW. Look at AI in Amazon. And it's not replacing people, because people say to me all the time, well, you have these companies and you're replacing workers. No, I'm not. You know, here's what I'm doing. So a self ordering platform, you've seen in McDonald's, you've seen them through dried throughs. I'm taking a person that would be standing at that podium saying, hey, welcome to McDonald's Chewing Gum and playing on their phone and saying, well, I can do it 15 seconds faster and utilize that person, pay that person more money to do something better instead of doing that.
Robert Irvine [00:25:25]:
So I think we got to think about, look, I'm not talking about automatic station, but I'm talking about what in your career fields that you teach, whether it be AI, robotics, food trucking, that business is business one on one, no matter what. And it's as simple as this. You have a product that is better than somebody else's product, you sell that product at a profit, you put money away and you, you develop more products while you're selling this product at a high. Because if there's no pipeline to refill the product line, shirt, tie, jacket, shoes, underwear, socks, etc. What's the next thing? Oh, we're going from blue, going to black, right? There's always got to be a continuation of whatever it's going to be. So if you look at drones, we have a drone company, we have drones that at this big infantryman puts in his pocket, unzips it, puts it up, flies it over. Before we send people, we can look and say, okay, there's no hidden things there. Then we have a 10 million drone, a 30 million drone, a 50 million drone, 180 million drone.
Robert Irvine [00:26:39]:
What's next? Satellites in space? Believe me, it won't be space wars yet, but in 20, 40 years from now it may be. But I think that's the things we need to look at. The Russians are already, and Chinese are already looking at putting space stations like you see in Star Trek, where we're living on them and how many people know about hydroponics? We put it into space, we put it into space, realized it couldn't feed, we couldn't grow fast enough because there's nutrients in water, not soil. It never worked. But now they're working on the next generation of it because we can't keep taking food from other countries when we don't have enough of it. There are companies in the US that can't feed, and I can tell you that will deliver 60% of a product instead of 100% because we can't make it fast enough. So I think the schools have to think, okay, what's the next generation? It's almost like being a prophet, you know, what's the next generation of this and that? What's got to go in the curriculum? Because if you don't put it into a curriculum where kids are getting stimulated knowing that they can get a job. And I use cyber right now, I use it right now.
Robert Irvine [00:27:54]:
AI Right now they're the hottest things in the teaching world because that's the least fulfilled job in our space force, in our workforce, in our, you know, it's changing dramatically. And if you, you look at. Anybody know Dean Kamen, he developed the Segway, you know, the segue, right. He's responsible for 5,000 patents in the U.S. why? Because he thinks he'll take something like a neoprene SEAL team suit and make it better for the user. And you think that's a small space of society, but it's a great revenue stream because we have 70,000 of those people that do strange things while you're sleeping at night. The intravenous strip, the Coca Cola machine, right? They all come from this one man because he saw something he could do better than somebody else. That's what I'm asking you to do.
Robert Irvine [00:29:02]:
You know, the Coca Cola machine. Look at what they are now with the air pores. They're not just a, you know, tap it and now you've got 60 different ways to drink sugar and all this kind of stuff. And I'll tell you my T shirt, the military wears prison t shirts. They're $4. We use prison labor to make them. But if you're a special forces guy and you're rocking 200 pounds, the seams are here, but it rips your shoulders, literally skin on your shoulder. So we create one now that goes here.
Robert Irvine [00:29:35]:
And it sounds really simple, but that's a billion dollar company just for moving a seam from the top of the shoulder to the front of the shoulder.
Jason Altmire [00:29:48]:
You talk about AI and robotics and some things that, that very recently seem like science fiction, but they are right around the corner. In fact, they're here today. You hear all the applications and the projections of how this is going to affect different things. I don't hear a whole lot of talk about how it's going to affect culinary, food service, food production. That's your world. What's going to be the impact?
Robert Irvine [00:30:10]:
Well, it's so funny because you say it's my world, but it's not. It's a pillar that I stuck to. Started with, it's called food. Now we do robotics, AI self ordering clothing, nutrition bars. We have all these things that I seen change. I'll go specifically food, because you mentioned food, but I've already mentioned that. Why am I taking one guy to make a sauce Or a gravy that I can buy in a bag and save $12 an hour on labor. You're still cooking it, but you're boiling it and open it.
Robert Irvine [00:30:53]:
That's called modernization of food service. Cruise ships do it. Look at cruise ships. You think they get. Do you know how many cooks on a cruise ship? About 50. Yeah, but you see how many we serve more than the aircraft carrier. Why? Because the systems are built in place. And I look.
Robert Irvine [00:31:13]:
So I opened a Norwegian pearl 32 years ago. That's how old I am. She was a new ship then. I was on her two weeks ago on a culinary cruise. I actually take senior leaders of our Navy to a cruise ship to show them how the cruise ship is set up. It goes on. On a box. It comes out the box.
Robert Irvine [00:31:32]:
It goes into lexings. It goes up to refrigerators and freezers and fouring rooms, and then it goes up to an elevator to the galley where they cook at. Right. That's the future of what we do in our military. That's the future. So when you say kids don't play Game Boy or whatever, don't say that, because that's the future of our military. That is the future of our military. And you have to see in your own world what's the.
Robert Irvine [00:32:01]:
What's the next generation of what you're teaching now, because it is evolving so fast. Knives, we have knives, we have plates, we have cooked, where we have all that. But even that's changing now. So I would say to all the educators, just, you've got to look at what you feel is the future and push for what you feel should be the curriculum to give these kids a head start in the future. Because every time you go through your school, one or two years, three years, whatever, it's already changing. And if you're ahead of that game, you'll continue. Your school will continue to grow and thrive because people want to go there. Because I know that I'm going to get the best training, and believe me, I'll pay for anything as long as it's the best.
Robert Irvine [00:32:49]:
And I'm learning. And I'm getting not today's advice. I'm getting four years ahead advice. Otherwise, what are we doing?
Jason Altmire [00:33:00]:
I think it's really interesting. You have a foundation called the Robert Irvine Foundation. You support veterans, first responders, do incredible work. You're passionate, you're committed. You're also an incredibly successful businessman. You've done very well for yourself through diversity of interests. How do you balance purpose versus profit?
Robert Irvine [00:33:22]:
Well, I can tell you there's no such thing as purpose versus profit to start with. You have to be able to make the money, be able to be comfortable, to be able to dedicate. So when I started my first company and it failed, I'm okay, I don't mind failure. And it only failed not because of what I did, but because I went to you basically was a meat company that I would dust the meat with it with a spice and sell it. 50 pound cases. I still had a job with Donald Trump on his casinos, but I was doing that on the side. Tops Hamburgers, you may remember. Tops Hamburgers, it was the largest hamburger company in the country.
Robert Irvine [00:34:07]:
It went bankrupt because it had a recall of £1 million of hamburgers with listeria. Well, bang went my company and I couldn't find somebody else to do it. Okay, fast forward. What does, what does the industry need? I work out every day. Protein bar. That's how that literally by osmosis. The same with the clothing. Jumping out of a plane with a bunch of young kids and they're complaining about it.
Robert Irvine [00:34:36]:
Let me look at this. Let me look at it. You know, uniforms, and that's the. I'm in the middle of that right now. Uniforms are military. Why don't they work? They females. Sorry, they don't have uniform. They get men's uniforms.
Robert Irvine [00:34:50]:
Why? That's not acceptable. Not acceptable. So I'm changing that, right, because I've got an opportunity to do it and make a difference. And most of my life is spent so the modernization of the military, which is a big job by the way, they don't pay me, I get paid. The foundation gets paid $1. I have an office in the Pentagon. I have a restaurant in the Pentagon. I Travel the globe 345 days a year, just coming as far as the North Pole with the Marines a couple of weeks ago, looking at their cold weather gear and does it keep them warm.
Robert Irvine [00:35:28]:
All these things that I just. How can we make that better?
Jason Altmire [00:35:34]:
So if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that your pursuit of profit affects or directly is related to your passion for solving problems and having a purpose.
Robert Irvine [00:35:47]:
So you would think that being a chef, my passion would be food. It's not, Never has been. The food has been a stepping stone to my passion, which is the military. I was in Her Majesty's Royal Navy. I know what works, I know what doesn't work, and I know what I think is going to work in the future. But that's up to me to show you a decision maker. Hey, look, these shorts and it sounds really funny, but it's a big deal. Shorts that you do PT in, they're not comfortable.
Robert Irvine [00:36:20]:
They rub my legs, they whatever. How do we make them better? Well, I can make them cheaper, but I can also make them better based on the volume. So if Walmart comes to me and says, hey Robert, or Sam's Club or Costco says, hey Robert, we'd like to make this scalloping butter sauce better, I take it, I make it better, I make it cheaper and I sell a lot more of it. And I think that's the future. And by the way, it has to change by 15% of whatever the original thing is, right? So I just keep looking for whatever is going to help the people. And it may not be, it may be firefighters, right, with fire retardant under clothing. But that feeds my foundation. So the money I sell from here feeds a foundation to be able to do, if you think twice a week, something somewhere around the world.
Robert Irvine [00:37:18]:
We feed between 300 and 3,000 people every week. We have reuniting the brave. I put units back together, I, wheelchairs, dogs, a whole bunch of grants and programs. But I can do that because the revenue is generated from these companies goes into that foundation. So it feeds both. There's no such thing as a balance. And if anybody tell you there's balance in life, they're full of crap. There's no such thing.
Robert Irvine [00:37:51]:
If you're a type A personality, you want to be successful, you're going to work hard. And what suffers from that? Your marriage, your family? Because you want in one hand to provide. And the only way you're going to do that is by working hard. And then you miss out on, you know, the little things in life, which are big things like kids walking and all those kind of things. I can tell you because I wanted to. I'm a driven human being and I, I wrote a book, Overcoming Impossible. It's probably about eight bucks. I don't even know what it is on Amazon.
Robert Irvine [00:38:27]:
The money goes to charity. But it talks about how to become successful. It's not of follow this and you're going to become a billionaire. It's real life story stories and scenarios that, that you get through. And if you look on the back cover of that, it's the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who, I've changed their cultures and it's really interesting to walk into somebody that runs a, you know, gazillion dollar business but they completely miss the leadership part. And this is what I will tell you. All teaching is about empathy. So is leadership.
Robert Irvine [00:39:05]:
I should know that Judy has an autistic mother, and she comes to work and she's not the normal Judy, not the person I know. And I have to say what's going on? And she's going to tell me all my mother. I said, oh, okay, go home. Take the week off. I got you. You don't worry. You got to take care of your mother. What do I do there? I get a loyal human being because she knows I care about her family and her.
Robert Irvine [00:39:32]:
I give empathy. She's going to work twice as hard for me as ever. Because, by the way, in all my companies, we've never given hours of operation, time to take off, days, weeks. I say this. I have 60 heads. I say, here's the thing. If you want to take four weeks off, great, but somebody's got to do your job. I don't care.
Robert Irvine [00:39:53]:
You take four weeks off. And what does that do? In since 1996, we've lost three people. And that's because I chose to lose them because they lost me $3 million. Everybody else has been with me for that time.
Jason Altmire [00:40:10]:
That would be. That's a good place to close, maybe tie a bow on that concept. How can businesses and schools and leaders foster a culture of service and community activity rather than just profit seeking?
Robert Irvine [00:40:27]:
I think, look, they're the same entity, right? If I'm teaching Judy, I get to know Judy. I'm a professor or teacher of whatever we're teaching. I have to know her story. She has to know when she graduates. I have to have an open line of communication that she can come back anytime or I can go anytime. Right. Because I'm investing in people. I'm not investing in a product.
Robert Irvine [00:40:56]:
The product will sell because it's a necessity. But when I invest in people, that's the growth of the organization. Because I don't want to be working, traveling 345 days a year in the next five years. Maybe I will. I don't know. But I want successes. I want people to train people that be. And.
Robert Irvine [00:41:16]:
And Jay's here. Somebody sitting over there. Come here quickly. Sorry.
Jason Altmire [00:41:23]:
That's okay.
Robert Irvine [00:41:24]:
So this is J.P. he's like my own son. Works for FitCrunch. And you've been working for how long? You have to go to microphone or come. Come down. Bring to my thing. How long you been working for FitCrunch?
Jason Altmire [00:41:39]:
I've done with you for about 10 years.
Robert Irvine [00:41:41]:
Okay. Why are you still here? Tell them the truth.
Jason Altmire [00:41:46]:
Yeah. So I started with FitCrunch about, like, I said 10 years ago, from the beginning. So I had recently had open heart surgery about five years ago. And when I had started with Robert, it was nice to leave a corporate environment into something that I could be more creative. So when I started with FitCrunch, it was more of like letting my creativity and how I wanted to sell a product come to life. Right about five years into my journey with FitCrunch had to get open heart surgery. The first person that called me right after open heart surgery was that man right there. And from that point on, I knew that I not only had a best friend, but I wanted to do whatever possible for this guy, FitCrunch, drones, you name it, I got this guy's back.
Jason Altmire [00:42:47]:
So I left an industry and I came and I found, you know, my best friend. And from here on out, I got this guy's back tenfold. But I owe a lot to this guy right here. And yeah, I can't say enough about him.
Robert Irvine [00:43:03]:
So I did that on purpose because we didn't rehearse this, by the way. When you take people. When you take people and you invest the time in them. And he come from a completely different. What were you doing before FitCrunch?
Jason Altmire [00:43:20]:
I was working for a third party manufacturing company, company Jabil Circuit, working on a hemodialysis machine. Supply chain management.
Robert Irvine [00:43:27]:
That's got nothing to do with bars, right? And you heard drones. This, this, this, this. Now I'm moving him over to Terra Armor because he's. He's established his own way of doing things. And all I do is say, here's the vision, here's the expectation. Now go and do it. I shouldn't be doing that. That's why I have people.
Robert Irvine [00:43:52]:
Why am I paying people if I don't let them do it? And one of the things we tend to do in industry is we micromanage because we don't want to give you the pat on the back. We want to take that. No, it's got nothing to do with me. That was JP or it was this one. That's important. You give kudos and you don't hug the light and you don't, you know, it's not about you anymore. And I think that's the difference. I've learned.
Robert Irvine [00:44:20]:
I've learned to listen a lot more, not say too much, just watch and then take action. That's it. Right, you sit down there.
Jason Altmire [00:44:36]:
We are grateful, Chef Irvine, for you being with us today. But more important, importantly, we're grateful for everything that you have done. Thank you for your service and thank you for your commitment to first responders and veterans. We're grateful for your service.
Robert Irvine [00:44:50]:
Can I just leave you one thing? It does not cost money to help somebody. It means opening a car door, helping somebody across the road. Listening can save a life. How many people shop at stores? My wife does online. But anyway, if you see the food going through the cash register and it gets pushed to the side and you can afford to pay for it, please do so. Not because you want fanfare out of it. Just because that food that you purchase that somebody has just pushed to the side may be able to feed a child. And I say this every time I close an event, no matter where I am.
Robert Irvine [00:45:30]:
We all do good things for the people that we know. I'm saying I want you to do one good thing for one person that you don't know every day. Because collectively, the world will be a much better place if we do something for people we don't know. I appreciate you listening. Thank you for inviting me. Teach, teach and make your networks bigger.
Jason Altmire [00:45:57]:
Chef Robert Irvine.
Robert Irvine [00:46:03]:
Thank you.
Jason Altmire [00:46:08]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.